Film reviews: Anemone and The Smashing Machine

Anemone

Directed by Ronan Day-Lewis (R)

★★

“It’s touching that Daniel Day-Lewis came out of retirement to launch his son’s movie career,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Alas, the project that the pair made together turns out to be “a dud of a movie—aridly pretentious and static, with too much self-conscious art photography and not enough drama.” As great as the 68-year-old actor often has been, he’s “not especially memorable” here, and though 27-year-old first-time director Ronan Day-Lewis “shows flashes of talent,” Anemone, for most of its 125 minutes, “just sits there.”

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It arrives eight years after Daniel’s previous film, Phantom Thread, and the three-time Oscar winner’s magnetic intensity “remains undimmed,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. He plays Ray Stoker, a traumatized former British soldier who has been living alone in a remote cabin for 20 years when his brother seeks his help with a troubled family scion. But the role of Ray’s brother is “mostly reactive,” putting co-star Sean Bean at a disadvantage, and the screenplay, co-written by the film’s director and star, is built around a few “chewy monologues” that feel stagy.

Two of Day-Lewis’ monologues, at least, prove “mesmerizing,” said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. But the film’s peaks are “quickly swallowed again by the booming sense of import.” Still, the younger Day-Lewis could well evolve into a solid filmmaker. “Anemone certainly looks serious,” complete with “swirling skies” and “eerie montages” that suggest “weighty themes and big emotions.”

The Smashing Machine

Directed by Benny Safdie (R)

★★★

“The Smashing Machine is satisfying as much for what it doesn’t do as for what it does,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Dwayne Johnson stars in the new biopic, playing former UFC champ Mark Kerr. And though Kerr’s cage career traced a familiar arc from early success to addiction and a comeback, director Benny Safdie “doesn’t try to apply any Rocky-style narrative formulas.” Johnson’s Kerr is simply a guy who takes life as it comes, and he and the film’s other characters “feel lived-in, not written, with flaws and attributes that chime with things we see in our family, our friends, ourselves.”

Johnson, who was a pro wrestling star before beginning his film career two decades ago, is “by far the best thing in the movie,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. “Actually, he’s kind of the only thing in the movie,” because so little attention is devoted even to Kerr’s up-and-down relationship with his girlfriend and wife that Emily Blunt can’t flesh out the character. Safdie, by trying to avoid sports biopic clichés, wound up with a film that’s “too understated and glancing for its own good.”

You might expect plenty of adrenaline-fueled action in a UFC biopic from a director who co-created Uncut Gems with his older brother, said Trace Sauveur in Paste. Instead, Safdie has given us “a quiet drama about a gentle giant.” A 2002 documentary about Kerr, also titled The Smashing Machine, was “somehow more potent.”