Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

The Tender Bar

George Clooney’s latest film adapts the autobiographical novel of the same name by J.R. Moehringer. The film tells the story of young Moehringer’s growth from child (Daniel Ranieri) to adulthood (Tye Sheridan) as he grows up and makes a play for attendance at Yale or Harvard in honor of his mother’s wishes.

Lily Rabe is affecting as his mother with Christopher Lloyd in a brief, but impactful role as his grandfather. Ranieri and Sheridan likewise give solid performances, but this film hangs on the skills of Ben Affleck as his uncle, Charlie. Charlie is an educated bartender who serves up keen observations on life and love, giving J.R. the father figure he never had with his own deadbeat one (Max Martini) away working as a DJ in New York City, keep his drunkenness away from the family.

The film moves back-and-forth in time between the elder J.R. and his younger self, blending the advice he’s given together into a love-fueled pursuit of success and happiness. Clooney’s film is wryly observed, served with a garnish of humor that elevates the material beyond the scope of what we usually see in these types of coming of age movies. While it holds no candle to his superlative Good Night, and Good Luck., the film is the best he’s done in years with his estimable skills put to good use.

The Mitchells vs. the Machines

Over the years, Sony Pictures Animation has produced a wide array of animated films, including the popular Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Surf’s Up, Hotel Transylvania, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Yet, it wasn’t until Spider-Man that the studio had displayed the level of creative energy and emotional heft to make more than forgettable entertainment product. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse changed that and it seems like they’ve taken that film’s success to heart and produced the slightly less impressive The Mitchells vs. the Machines.

When it was originally announced under the title Connected, the original promotional materials didn’t do the film justice. It looked like another generic family-based animated feature with a servile plot and lackluster character development. Somewhere between that expected 2020 release and its actual 2021 release, the title changed and while I admit that I prefer the original title, the new one better connected the audience to the premise of the film. In it, the Mitchells are a traditional American family.

Daughter Katie (Abbi Jacobson) is a technophile who loves making short movies and wants to go to film school. Dad Rick (voiced by Danny McBride) is a survivalist who doesn’t like or trust technology. Mom Linda (Maya Rudolph) acts as a buffer between the two, once thick as thieves, but now grating against each other over a seemingly disconnected approach to life. Son Aaron (Mike Rianda) loves dinosaurs and looks up to his sister who is the only person who gets him and vice versa.

Katie and Rick are growing more distant as they grow older, Katie resenting him for not taking her passions seriously and he is upset that his little girl has grown up and abandoned all that once made them seemingly inseparable. When he abruptly cancels her plane ticket to California and forces the family on a cross-country road trip, things get out of hand long before the tech uprising led by smart device operating system PAL (Olivia Colman) pushes the family off their track and into roles as saviors of humanity.

The film goes to great lengths to set up this technological plotline, though it’s dropped haphazardly into the first act of the film, giving the audience little time to anticipate what is happening. That level of surprise makes for a jarring moment in the film, which would almost seem fitting thematically if it didn’t feel like that particular connection is unintended. Rianda, who co-directed and wrote the screenplay with Jeff Rowe, gives the audience a lot of the kind of sermonizing they’ve come to expect from such a film, but manages to infuse the production with just enough creativity and inventiveness to make up for it.

As the film progresses, that predictability slowly fades and the viewer can settle into the hilarity that ensues as this ungainly, prototypical American family turns their dysfunction into success. A lot of the heavy-handedness is easily forgiven when you’re treated to a film with such passion and verve. Then again, the animation style leaves a lot to be desired, mixing styles as easily as its young protagonist does with her own work. The style might not work for some, but it should work for many and the end result is something fun and adventurous that families suffering from similar generational divides might be able to learn something from as long as both sides are willing to listen, like our ill-fitting cinematic subjects.