#one of the most unrewardingly stressful movies i've ever seen

[cantsayidont]

More hateration holleration. No poster art; I didn't like any of these movies and don't feel like looking at their posters again.

ABOUT HIM & HER (2023): Experimental romantic drama, set in 1989 and "based on a true memory," about an unnamed man (Callan McAuliffe) and an unnamed woman (Cristina Spruell) who are accidentally connected by a phone company mishap. Over a series of subsequent long-distance conversations, they become emotionally entangled and eventually agree to meet, but they're both so afraid that finally seeing each other face-to-face will shatter their delicate intimacy that they spend the entire second half of the film trying to avoid looking at one another, even though they both desperately want to. The characters' interactions are carefully staged throughout (at first, they're just voices, and we don't get a look at either of their faces until they're both in the hotel room), but this initially touching conceit eventually becomes SO contrived that the story's genuine poignancy is undercut by a growing resentment at being jerked around in such a heavy-handed way. This is perhaps the ultimate romantic idiot plot: Despite their insecurity, the characters are both skinny, conventionally attractive, straight white cisgender adults of similar age and class; the only thing keeping them apart is their reluctance to (literally) just open their eyes, and there's no reason to assume that even a failure of nerve on that front would be irreconcilable save for the filmmakers' stubborn commitment to the melancholy bit. (The end credits claim that the lead actors never saw each other or even learned each other's name until the film's premiere.)

I.S.S. (2023): Upsettingly grim apocalyptic drama — not really a thriller, though billed as one — about six astronauts aboard the International Space Station, three Americans (Ariana DeBose, Chris Messina, and John Gallagher Jr.) and three Russians (Masha Mashkova, Costa Ronin, and Pilou Asbæk), whose respective governments order them to turn on each other as nuclear war breaks out on Earth. Well-acted and generally well-made, but there's little real suspense because an unbearably bleak outcome is always a certainty, making the fates of the individual characters a more or less moot point; the only leavening factor the script can offer is a contrived subplot involving an experimental treatment for radiation poisoning, which is clearly too little, too late in the face of the global nuclear holocaust the characters see unfolding on the surface below. A stressful downer that makes Lars von Trier's nightmarish 2011 end-of-the-world movie MELANCHOLIA seem like a screwball comedy by comparison.

PARALLEL (2024): Unconvincing sci-fi drama, cowritten by stars Aldis and Edwin Hodge (and based on a 2019 Chinese film) about unhappy spouses Vanessa (Danielle Deadwyler) and Alex (Aldis Hodge), who are staying in a remote lake house with Alex's brother Martel (Edwin Hodge) as they struggle to come to grips with the recent death of their young son. The woods surrounding the house are also a nexus of parallel timelines, where alternate versions of the characters seek to supplant one another in what they hope will be better versions of their previous lives. It's nice to see this kind of sci-fi allegory with an all-Black cast, but it doesn't really work dramatically, marred by an over-reliance on exposition and some rather arbitrary rules (which the characters accept far more readily than it seems like they should under the circumstances) that make the plot's rapidly escalating violence hard to swallow. Aldis Hodge comes across well as always, but Deadwyler's part doesn't allow for much emotional nuance, and Edwin Hodge is stuck in an awkward third-wheel role.

PASSAGES (2023): Glum, dishearteningly biphobic French drama about a married man called Tomas (Franz Rogowski) who spurns his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) for a younger woman called Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and then attempts to retreat to Martin after Agathe becomes pregnant, eventually managing to alienate them both. Why either was ever interested in him in the first place is never very clear, as Tomas is unattractive, solipsistic, and thoroughly unsympathetic (though Martin is no prize himself, leaving Agathe as the most tolerable character basically by default). All of the characters are thinly drawn, and some interesting directorial choices can't make up for the film's conspicuous lack of warmth or its aggravating determination to equate Tomas's bisexuality (a word the script studiously avoids) with his consuming selfishness and inability to commit emotionally.