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Review: For a murder mystery, ‘Bad Monkey’ sure knows how to have a good time

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There is a monkey in “Bad Monkey,” a new miniseries premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+ and based on the book of the same name by Carl Hiaasen , but apart from one affectionate bite on an ear and an inability — or perhaps a refusal — to do tricks, it doesn’t do anything bad.

In fact, the monkey, named Driggs, is quite adorable. (It is less, admittedly, adorable on the page.) In any case, “Bad Monkey” is a more arresting title than “Adorable Monkey,” and better suited to a story of fraud and murder under a tropical sun.

Set in Hiaasen’s customary South Florida sloshing grounds, with trips to the Bahamas, it stays mostly true to the author’s genial spirit, following his main plot, with the usual adjustments and interpolations, building out minor characters and throwing in some anomalous magical realism to soften the blow of one of its several intertwined story lines. Developed by “Scrubs” creator and “Ted Lasso” co-creator Bill Lawrence , it’s like three or four episodes of an episodic television series mashed into one, in a generally tasty, unfussy way — not so much a meat and potatoes production as fried shrimp and beer.

It’s a comedy, mostly, with folksy, tall-tale narration by Tom Nowicki and enough banter to fill all six “Thin Man” movies, whose combined length this 10-episode series nearly equals — though you couldn’t exactly call it banter, as it’s mostly laconic chatterbox hero Andrew Yancy ( Vince Vaughn ) doing the talking. Yancy is a former police detective in the Florida Keys, on suspension for having used his car to push his girlfriend’s husband’s golf cart — with her husband — into the sea. Bonnie Witt, played by Michelle Monaghan, is the girlfriend, a sexy, slightly dangerous bibliophile whose real name is not Bonnie Witt.

Vehicular assault, adultery and his creative attempts to sabotage the sale of a monstrous yellow spec house next door notwithstanding, Yancy is 97% a good guy, upright where it matters, dogged in a way he can’t help — the sort of hero who remains at least outwardly unruffled in any situation and whose company, in the appealing person of Vaughn, is strangely relaxing. Sensitive to nature, he enjoys his beautiful ocean view and the wildlife that comes to his property and more than once points out that the streetlights are red so just-hatched baby turtles don’t confuse them with the moon and head away from the sea rather than into it. And he really hates that big yellow house.

Vince Vaughn and Bill Lawrence have a gift for gab. In ‘Bad Monkey,’ they finally join forces

Vince Vaughn and Bill Lawrence were once poker buddies trying to make their way in Hollywood. As they both ascended, they never had the chance to work together, until now.

Meanwhile, in the Bahamas, on the island of Andros, young fisherman Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet, charming), the proprietor of the eponymous monkey, has a parallel problem — the seaside shack his father left him, and in which he would be content to spend the rest of his days, is being threatened by the development of a resort. Neville is being more immediately threatened by the developer’s local thug, Egg (David St. Louis), completely amoral and frightening but with a lovely singing voice.

A severed human arm, reeled in by a fishing tourist, comes into Yancy’s keeping when the local sheriff tasks him with transporting it to the Miami police in hopes that it will relieve him of that headache. This brings him into contact with medical examiner Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez, sparky, spunky), who, you know and I know, will end up in some sort of relationship with our hero. (They bond over mango popsicles.)

Yancy comes to believe that what looks like an accident — shark? propellor? — may just be murder, especially after meeting Eve Stripling (Meredith Hagner), the widow of the identified owner of the severed arm. And with no official standing, he sets out to investigate, towing Rosa in his wake, much to the exasperated concern of his best friend and former partner, Rogelio Burton (John Ortiz), whom Yancy constantly encourages to be more emotionally expressive.

Through a number of twists and turns, Yancy’s quest will lead to Andros, where Eve turns up alongside the resort’s developer, Christopher Grunion (Rob Delaney), and where Neville, encouraged by friends, has turned to the mysterious, imperious woman known as the Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith), a practitioner of Obeah , for magical help in keeping his house.

The Bahama scenes, especially the Dragon Queen’s expanded story — she’s a major character here — are tonally distinct from the rest of the series. They run closer to straight drama, shaped and powered by Turner-Smith’s commanding performance — indeed, hers is the only thread in the series that might be called moving, the rest being interesting, amusing, exciting or fun. As we get nearer to a reckoning, bad characters get worse, desperation ramps up the danger, and there’s a hurricane. But this is not the sort of series that will leave evil unpunished or afflict the good with senseless tragedy. It believes in happiness.

Famous faces in the large and universally impressive cast include Zach Braff “as you’ve never seen him” as a pill-popping Medicare fraudster and Scott Glenn as Jim, Yancy’s spiritually inclined father. Bob Clendenin is funny as a needy, talkative pilot, and Gonzalo Menendez earns his hisses as a crooked cop. L. Scott Caldwell as the Dragon Queen’s grandmother; Charlotte Lawrence as Eve’s stepdaughter, a Christian hipster; and Nina Grollman, as Madeline, a young woman on whom Yancy keeps a watchful eye after her boyfriend is murdered, all make the most of their screen time. Alex Moffat plays the glad-handing developer behind the big yellow house; he doesn’t care what happens to the baby turtles.

Even the small parts, of which there are many more, are more than usually substantial, as if Lawrence felt it would be unfair to give any actor too little to do.

What makes “Bad Monkey” special is that there is nothing special about it. It’s a little wayward at times, what with its huge cast of characters and myriad plot lines, some of which are, strictly speaking, unnecessary, but it gets the job done in a good old-fashioned colorful way. Where many streaming mysteries make a fetish of style, depth, sociopolitical relevance and formal novelty, aiming to become conversation starters, the conversation around “Bad Monkey” might run simply like this:

“Seen that show ‘Bad Monkey’?”

“Yeah, it’s good.”

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Land of Bad

There are two heroes in the frustrating military actioner “Land of Bad,” and one of them’s more convincing than the other. During a hostage extraction mission gone bad, both heroes fight the kind of terrorists who behead a hostage in an establishing scene and then later philosophize about the real difference between us and them (it’s a doozy).

“Land of Bad” is most compelling when it sticks to hero #1, the capable but inexperienced Air Force Sergeant J.J. “Playboy” Kinney ( Liam Hemsworth ). Hemsworth’s a believable man of action, thanks in no small part to strong action choreography and filmmaking. His co-star, Russell Crowe , is no slouch either, even though it is harder to appreciate his performance given his irritating role as hero #2. Crowe plays Captain Eddie “Reaper” Grimm, the socially awkward, but professionally adept drone pilot who tries to guide Kinney away from terrorists and missiles, and then eventually towards rescue.

Crowe’s most endearing when he’s staring wide-eyed at mood-lit banks of computer monitors, relaying and extrapolating information with his supportive wing-lady, Staff Sergeant Nia Branson ( Chika Ikogwe ). Grimm’s a lot less charming when he’s mostly explicitly making the movie’s big bathetic point, all about the military’s failure to support capable, dedicated professionals like Grimm, who has to fight up-hill to be taken seriously. “Land of Bad” may sell itself as a post-“ Black Hawk Down ” rescue mission thriller, but it’s too often a baggy dramatized lecture about what’s really wrong with the American military and modern warfare.

As Kinney’s handler, Grimm guides Hemsworth’s overwhelmed, but capable soldier while he shoots, climbs, and wades through enemy territory in search of a high priority hostage. The prisoner in question is a CIA spy who’s been gathering intelligence on a dangerous Russian arms dealer. None of that matters once Kinney’s team engages with their bloodthirsty enemies, who, according to some introductory on-screen narration, are among “the most violent extremist groups in Southern Asia.”

The makers of “Land of Bad” mostly reduce their movie’s antagonists to generic obstacles for Kinney, except for a few key scenes that strain to establish why they’re actually the worst. These bad guys (briefly) revel in their psychopathy, torturing and executing their prisoners in a “ Saw ”-looking cave prison. “I look a man in the eye and I make my choice intimate,” one torture-prone terrorist boasts, moments after Kinney insists, “That’s not the conversation we should be having right now.”

So when is the right time? Maybe not in “Land of Bad,” where hero #1 rarely slows down long enough to explain himself while hero #2 should probably follow suit. Grimm’s a neurotic mess, an energy-drink fueled loner who takes great umbrage with snotty (and notably younger) Colonel Virgil Packett, played by Daniel MacPherson . Some pains are taken to humanize Grimm, mostly during for-the-cheap-seats comedic asides about how ignoble, but also down-to-earth he is.

Grimm’s particular about his work chair. He makes a big to do about Keurig-style coffee pods and is painfully sincere when he tells Branson that a wedding is, “probably the greatest social ritual that humanity has.” Grimm’s also the only one who can bring Kinney back safe, a rote characterization that’s mainly unbearable given how plodding and plentiful Grimm’s scenes are. Why is there so much of hero #2 in this movie, or really, why do we have to know so much about him in order for his rapport with hero #1 to matter?

Grimm accidentally puts his finger on why most of his scenes are so irritating, both as a dramatic break and defense of Kinney’s grisly and sometimes thrilling scenes. Speaking about his fourth wife, he tells Branson the old joke about how you can tell if someone’s a vegan. “They will tell you,” he laughs to himself.

Any “Land of Bad” scene where characters show you why they’re the best at what they do is usually enticing, at least compared when they desperately try to make you see pulpy cyphers as flesh-and-blood people. Director William Eubank already proved his technical finesse and solid understanding in earlier features, like the Kristen Stewart-led 2020 disaster adventure “ Underwater .” So it’s not surprising to see that “Land of Bad”’s action scenes are eerily poised and even beautiful because they’re dynamically lit and paced, and generally full-throated in their sensationalism. An airborne missile strike that takes out and ignites a hillside of militants (and their truck!) serves as a strong showcase for what Eubank’s latest has to offer. 

In its faint defense, “Land of Bad” delivers simple pleasures, like when Milo Ventimiglia , who’s also in this movie, shanks a terrorist in the neck with a broken dinner plate. Eubank and his collaborators might have delivered a better movie if they’d just made a high-toned programmer. As it is, “Land of Bad” is a pandering drama with some action movie thrills.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

• Liam Hemsworth as Kinney
• Russell Crowe as Reaper
• Luke Hemsworth as Abel
• Ricky Whittle as Bishop
• Milo Ventimiglia as Sugar
• Daniel MacPherson as
• Chika Ikogwe as
• David Frigerio
• William Eubank

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Critic’s Pick

‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’ Review: Older, but Never Wiser

In their latest buddy cop movie, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are still speeding through Miami. The franchise has rarely felt so assured, relaxed and knowingly funny.

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By Robert Daniels

Two years after Will Smith slapped the comedian Chris Rock on the Academy Awards stage, it feels bizarre that he needs a franchise called “Bad Boys” to rekindle his star power. Smith and his co-star, Martin Lawrence, are two producers of “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the stylishly chaotic lark by the directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, suggesting outsize roles as star-auteurs and the importance for this installment to be a hit. In their hands, “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” throws everything at the wall, and much of it sticks.

Though the third “Bad Boys” installment was released in early 2020, a few months before the George Floyd murder spurred Black Lives Matter protests, that film could be seen in some ways as apologizing for its Michael Bay past and its “copaganda” roots.

But this is something else — a silly buddy comedy that opens poignantly with the wedding of Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Christine (Melanie Liburd). There, Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) has a heart attack, a near-death experience that soon makes him feel invincible; Lowrey, however, is rendered vulnerable by debilitating panic attacks. It’s clear that these two hypermasculine men, still speeding through Miami in fast, slick cars, are aging.

Their friend Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) has been framed — after his death — in a cartel’s money laundering scheme, by corrupt government officials and the brooding mercenary James McGrath (Eric Dane). Lowrey and Burnett work to clear Captain Howard’s name, and in the process this film somehow becomes a prison-break movie, involving Lowrey’s incarcerated son, Armando (Jacob Scipio), and a revenge subplot involving Howard’s daughter Judy (Rhea Seehorn). Along the way there are nods to fan favorites, a cameo by Tiffany Haddish, and Miami gangsters hunting a wanted Lowrey and Burnett.

The lurid lighting and grandiose filmmaking mirror the extravagant plotting. A frantic shootout in a club is viciously edited. In other major set pieces, the camera, sometimes taking a first-person-shooter perspective, zips, darts and spins past falling bodies toward Smith and Lawrence, who banter playfully.

Their endearing camaraderie lands better than the shallow moments meant to ground Lowrey, whose panic attacks barely figure into his character growth or his relationship to his son. The role of Christine, his kidnapped wife, is severely underwritten. This film’s spectacle is absurd — a climactic raid on an abandoned amusement park features an albino alligator — but its shortcomings are barely noticeable.

Smith and Lawrence also make this adventure a riotous triumph. These stars embody the care and anxieties their characters feel for each other, wielding their chemistry to smooth over abrupt tonal shifts. For example, an all-out firefight looping in a Barry White needle drop is a major highlight. And a run-in with racist good old boys, inspiring a Reba McEntire cover of the film’s theme song, makes for another memorable scene.

This violent franchise has rarely felt so assured, so relaxed and knowingly funny. If “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” means that Smith, post-slap, will remain a bad boy for life, there are worse punishments to endure.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die Rated R for strong violence and sensual, lovemaking music. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters.

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100 Worst Movies of All Time

It’s bad movies galore as we encounter the Rottenest of the Rotten: 100 movies that scored less than 6% (from at least 20 reviews) with the critics on the Tomatometer!

You’re going to see lots of 0% movies, and there’s even more out there, but the ones on this list all have at least 20 reviews. We wanted to make sure the movies we’re “vouching” for as the worst ever have inflicted a minimum threshold of agony on critics. And the 20-review entry applies for every other movie on this list, and that includes the usual suspects of garbage cinema, like the deep space train wreck  Battlefield Earth , the box office turkey (turtle?)  The Master of Disguise , Netflix’s lazy western  The Ridiculous 6 , and flaccid softcore  Killing Me Softly  (which also makes a dubious appearance in the  200 best and worst erotic movies ).

You may also note a number of significant stinkers are from the past 20 years. It’s not just because Uwe Boll was employed during this time period. And, by the way, he’s actually beat by dubious directing duo Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, who have  four  movies on the list. Instead, it’s the fact more reviews are being written and collected than ever before, so today’s disasters have a better chance of vaunting over 20 reviews. (And for movies that share the same score, more reviews means you’re placed higher within the ranking.)

But fret not: Plenty of yesteryear’s bombs are here. After all, the decade that produced  Mac & Me  has a lot to account for. Some of the classic trash featured includes the soul-sucking  Mortal Kombat: Annihilation ,  Speed 2: Cruise Control  (see what happens when you throw Keanu overboard?), off-the-deep-end  Jaws: The Revenge , and prime directive-violating  RoboCop 3 .

What you  won’t  see: Some legendary bad movies like  Cats ,  Birdemic , and  The Room , all of which have cleared at least a 10% Tomatometer. That’s right, they were  too good . And  Miami Connection  and  Plan 9 From Outer Space  are actually Fresh!

Most recently, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey has squeezed in, the first movie to appear since 2020’s The Last Days of American Crime . Then we added the Alison Brie/John Cena joint Freelance .

Now that we set the mood for truly bad movies, start the most painful watchlist you’ll ever make with the 100 worst movies of all time! — Alex Vo

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002) 0%

One Missed Call (2008) 0%

Left Behind (2014) 0%

A Thousand Words (2012) 0%

Gotti (2018) 0%

Pinocchio (2002) 0%

SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (2004) 0%

Gold Diggers (2003) 0%

The Last Days of American Crime (2020) 0%

Jaws the Revenge (1987) 2%

The Ridiculous 6 (2015) 0%

Dark Crimes (2016) 0%

Stratton (2017) 0%

London Fields (2018) 0%

The Nutcracker (2010) 0%

Return to the Blue Lagoon (1991) 0%

Wagons East! (1994) 0%

Problem Child (1990) 0%

Cabin Fever (2016) 0%

3 Strikes (2000) 0%

The Disappointments Room (2016) 0%

Redline (2007) 0%

Staying Alive (1983) 0%

Look Who's Talking Now (1993) 0%

Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) 0%

Homecoming (2009) 0%

Bolero (1984) 0%

Precious Cargo (2016) 0%

Max Steel (2016) 0%

Killing Me Softly (2002) 0%

Merci Docteur Rey (2002) 0%

Transylmania (2009) 0%

Freelance (2023) 11%

Stolen (2009) 0%

Dark Tide (2012) 0%

Folks! (1992) 0%

Simon Sez (1999) 0%

Alone in the Dark (2005) 1%

The Master of Disguise (2002) 1%

Daddy Day Camp (2007) 1%

Disaster Movie (2008) 1%

Twisted (2004) 2%

Epic Movie (2007) 2%

Crossover (2006) 2%

The In Crowd (2000) 2%

One for the Money (2012) 2%

Texas Rangers (2001) 2%

Meet the Spartans (2008) 2%

King's Ransom (2005) 2%

Strange Wilderness (2008) 2%

Baby Geniuses (1999) 2%

Kickin' It Old Skool (2007) 2%

Nina (2016) 2%

The Haunting of Molly Hartley (2008) 3%

Battlefield Earth (2000) 3%

Rollerball (2002) 3%

Jack and Jill (2011) 3%

Bless the Child (2000) 4%

Getaway (2013) 3%

FeardotCom (2002) 3%

Half Past Dead (2002) 3%

The Roommate (2011) 3%

Deuces Wild (2002) 3%

The Mod Squad (1999) 3%

The Apparition (2012) 3%

House of the Dead (2003) 3%

Down to You (2000) 3%

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) 3%

Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star (2011) 3%

Deal (2008) 3%

The Darkness (2016) 3%

Passion Play (2010) 3%

Getting Even With Dad (1994) 3%

McHale's Navy (1997) 3%

Arsenal (2017) 3%

Twelve (2010) 3%

The Toy (1982) 3%

Shadow Conspiracy (1997) 7%

Because I Said So (2007) 3%

Godsend (2004) 3%

The Whole Ten Yards (2004) 4%

Serving Sara (2002) 4%

Vampires Suck (2010) 4%

Movie 43 (2013) 5%

Code Name: The Cleaner (2007) 4%

Flatliners (2017) 4%

Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997) 4%

The Covenant (2006) 4%

The Fog (2005) 4%

Zoom (2006) 5%

A Little Bit of Heaven (2011) 4%

Material Girls (2006) 4%

Mortal Kombat Annihilation (1997) 4%

BloodRayne (2005) 4%

Scary Movie V (2013) 4%

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007) 4%

The Cold Light of Day (2012) 4%

A Low Down Dirty Shame (1994) 4%

Just Getting Started (2017) 5%

The Last Airbender (2010) 5%

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“May December” Knows What It Thinks, and That’s a Problem

Some of the main conflicts in Todd Haynes ’s new film, “May December” (which opens Friday), are practically shouted from behind the camera, and they drown out other ones on which the story equally depends. The movie is a loose adaptation of the real-life story of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, who met in the mid-nineties at middle school and began a sexual relationship. Letourneau was a teacher in her thirties; Fualaau was twelve. Letourneau was convicted of rape and went to prison. They had two daughters together and, after her release, reunited and married. In “May December,” the couple is Gracie Atherton ( Julianne Moore ) and Joe Yoo (Charles Melton). He’s now in his thirties, and she’s in her fifties. They have three children and live in Savannah, Georgia. She’s a baker who also teaches classes on floral arrangements; he’s an X-ray technician, but his true passion is monarch butterflies, which he lovingly raises and releases into the wild. Gracie has a grand and lordly manner, and the mild-mannered Joe gets the brunt of her lording: when he tends his specimens, she orders him to get his “bugs” out of the house before company arrives.

The company arriving is Elizabeth Berry ( Natalie Portman ), a well-known TV actress, who’s preparing to portray Gracie in a movie and wants to get to know the family. Gracie and Joe are desperate for solicitude and empathy—as local pariahs, they are all too accustomed to finding boxes of shit delivered to their home—and they eagerly welcome Elizabeth. Haynes quickly makes clear that both Gracie and Elizabeth are narcissistic manipulators—perhaps a match made in cinematic heaven, but one that quickly skews a viewer’s rooting interest. (Whom the viewer is rooting for—I’d say by design—is Joe, but Haynes keeps Joe as his hole card, indeterminate nearly throughout and then revealed with precise and narrow certainty.)

Elizabeth is TV-famous—heads turn when she walks into the local high school and a restaurant—but not taken seriously as an actress, and she has a heap of ambition invested in the film. She’s got something to prove, she tells Gracie, because she comes from a family of academics who considered her too intelligent to be an actress. (Gracie’s comebacks to the humblebrag are priceless.) Though Elizabeth is just as self-centered as Gracie, she is comically ill-suited to portray her. When Gracie mentions that one of her brothers lives in Minneapolis and works for the Twins, Elizabeth wonders which twins, and Gracie, dripping with condescension worthy of Katharine Hepburn, explains that it’s “a professional baseball team.” The actress isn’t really interested in this world—or in Gracie or the family—only in the success that she hopes their story can bring her. Unsurprisingly, her ethical judgment proves as dubious as her artistic intentions.

The front-loading of the movie with such clear tensions leaves lots of cinematic space to fill, whether with information or mood, characterization or context. The effect is of a self-imposed directorial challenge, and, if Haynes doesn’t quite carry it off, he at least delivers an audacious effort, packed with memorable lines and images, gestures and inflections. He skillfully draws out the mismatch of Gracie and Elizabeth in his casting, not to mention his direction of the actors. Moore externalizes her dramatic expressions, subtly but unequivocally, whereas Portman expresses much by doing nothing: her acting is in her thought, and the less she pushes, the more comes through. Portman’s masklike manner serves Elizabeth well when meeting and questioning townspeople about Gracie—including Gracie’s ex-husband (D. W. Moffett) and her ex-lawyer (Lawrence Arancio)—but Gracie sees right through it to Elizabeth’s hungry hollow. In one of the movie’s great moments, Elizabeth gives Gracie a hug; Gracie doesn’t lift a hand in return.

What’s not out front (and what would be a cruel spoiler to divulge) is Elizabeth’s gamesmanship involving Joe, her contemporary, whom she attempts to envision through Gracie’s eyes. Haynes, working with a script by Samy Burch, stages the resulting games with a chilly briskness that’s matched by his shifting dramatic perspectives. Such is his casual yet cagily selective omniscience that the result sometimes feels like a deterministic marionette theatre with the strings showing. There are some reversals and revelations that play more like decisions to score moral points than like narrative outcomes. Haynes makes his own perspectives plain from the start—he looks seriously askance at both Elizabeth and Gracie, but nonetheless does his best to accord them a measure of dignity and empathy. He’s clearly on Team Joe, which gives him the dramatic problem that he doesn’t seem to find the person to whom he’s most sympathetic especially interesting.

The clarity of these conflicts is achieved by some conspicuous omissions. First off, there’s no definition of the relationship between Elizabeth and the couple. They seem to have consented to let this actress into their home, but what’s the transaction? Is there a contract for their life story? Are they being paid? Or is the expected payoff only a sympathetic portrayal, a positive public image? The film also gives no sense of the family’s internal negotiations about Elizabeth and the movie. The couple’s three children are unavoidably involved with the actress, too. We see their reactions, but these reactions have no firm significance, because what the kids agreed to, or what their parents foisted on them, remains unknown. The underlying matter of “May December” is the Hollywood way of doing things; it’s a cautionary reminder about how fast to run when someone asks to film your life story. The movie pivots on the irony that Elizabeth, in dubious pursuit of what she considers the truth about the family, enters the household and becomes an instant catalyst of latent reactions, a kind of walking truth serum, a negative of a negative. (The result, unfortunately, is a climactic scene, bringing decades of trouble to the surface, that’s one of the most ludicrous “duh” moments in recent movies.)

The film’s sympathies are drawn as if with a ruler—only the boxes of shit are perhaps a bit much. It’s as if Haynes were pulling a reverse Wolfie, making sure (exactly as Martin Scorsese didn’t do, in “ The Wolf of Wall Street ”) that his own stern judgments suffuse the drama throughout. And who can blame him, given the appalling backstory of the Atherton-Yoo family, compared with the merely venal sins of Scorsese’s fraudster? Yet the result is that Haynes takes hold of an immensely strange and troubling story and renders it . . . just fine. In delivering it, the movie offers good actors, good dialogue, good performances, a steady tone, a few memorable twists, some striking moments—it’s manifestly the work of a major director—but it means what it means, and it means nothing more. It leaves no great mystery and allows no great ambiguity, because Haynes knows where he stands at every moment and wants to make sure that the viewer knows, too. He trims off all the loose ends, lest someone pull at one of them and make the fixed perspective unravel. As so often happens, trouble with substance starts as trouble with form. The movie’s dramatic framework is bound up tightly and sealed off, and Haynes doesn’t puncture or fracture it to let in the wealth of details that the story implies—of art and money, power and presumption. The result is engaging and resonant—but it nonetheless feels incomplete, unfinished. ♦

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The best performances of 2024.

A professor claimed to be Native American. Did she know she wasn’t ?

Kanye West bought an architectural treasure—then gave it a violent remix .

Why so many people are going “ no contact ” with their parents.

Ina Garten and the age of abundance .

How a homegrown teen gang punctured the image of an upscale community .

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