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 Power of the Dog

Some world class filmmakers don’t take every project that comes their way, nor do they push to produce content out every year. Jane Campion is one such director who came to broad attention with her 1993 Best Picture nominee The Piano, her third feature film. In the intervening 28 years, she’s directed four full feature films and two segments of other projects. The Power of the Dog is her third film that starts with “The P” and it’s just as magnificent as The Piano and better than her stunning follow up to that film, The Portrait of a Lady.

Starring Benedict Cumberbatch as charismatic rancher Phil Burbank who seldom carouses with his compatriots, employing a hulking bravado to stay at the top of the pecking order even if he prefers to spend most of his time in isolation. He never fails to remind his brother George (Jesse Plemons) of the mentorship the late “Bronco” Henry provided them and becomes vengeful when George falls for and marries widowed innkeeper Rose (Kirsten Dunst) who brings her effeminate son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) with her. His harassment of Peter and Rose is subtle, but disconcerting, with Rose turning to the bottle for comfort and Peter taking a different tack.

The acting is beautiful. Cumberbatch plays his character with ambivalence, longing, and vulnerability. His hard-edged life a front for his feelings of loneliness in the wake of his mentor’s death. Smit-McPhee captures something different. He’s fully aware of his perceived homosexuality, but the taunts and barbs seem to affect him far less. His innate sense of self and determination to become a doctor override many of the baser instincts that Cumberbatch’s Phil occasionally exhibits. Director Jane Campion captures the unusual interplay between the two as the power dynamic shifts as one becomes more unguarded while the other begins enacting his own vengeance.

The film not only subverts the concepts of masculinity enshrined in decades worth of western cinema, but asks the audience to challenge their own interpretations of strength and fragility, not just in the core of the male ego, but in the destructive nature of that environment on the human psyche, hardening those who could have lived a life of quiet potency, but instead had to hide who they were in an effort to avoid persecution. The film has numerous fascinating themes playing across its length and Campion’s film is tightly focused, flowing naturally through several acts, covering the span of two hours in what feels like far shorter a time. Her masterful use of framing and composition make for a delightful viewing experience even if the nature of the story is a sometimes dark and contemplative one.

Onward

Pixar’s output has shifted from one focused solely on ingenuity to one enamored with modest concepts that work on a whatever scale they approach without feeling like they redefine the genre. The days of consistent hits are long behind them. The death of original Brain Trust member Joe Ranft may have signaled that change. All of the studio’s greatest ideas where his, which shows just how much the departure of a great mind can dilute the end result.

Onward is the kind of film that looks interesting on paper, a magical world of elves, ogres, unicorns, and pixies that found magic too hard and relied instead on technology to better their lives, leading to a modernist society that is a shell of its former glory. Tom Holland voices Ian Lightfoot, a teenage elf whose big brother Barley (Chris Pratt) is a laze-about who is more concerned with having fun with life than either fitting in or being productive. His is a world filled with that magic seemingly lost to their world while pragmatic Ian seems to take more after his mother Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) than his late father.

As his 16th birthday approaches, Ian and Barley are given a gift their mother has held onto for their father for just such an occasion. Within is a staff with a magical gem and a parchment detailing a spell that will bring their father back to them for 24 hours. While Barley is unable to activate the staff for all his desire and passion for the old ways, Ian is the catalyst, but he isn’t strong enough, so the spell only brings back the lower half of their father, forcing them to quest to get another magical stone to complete the spell before time runs out.

Pixar’s animators try very hard to take the concepts and run with it and they are occasionally successful, especially in the scenes with Octavia Spencer’s Manticore and the flightless pixie bikers, but a lot of their ideas are thrown out there and disappear just as quickly, leaving very little impact. The notions of family are sometimes well observed, but too often feel shoehorned into the narrative and while the last act is a thrilling one living up the Pixar legacy, all that’s lead up to that point feels only serviceable at best.

What If…?

Last month, Disney offered a discounted subscription. $1.99 for a full month. While my aversion to the Disney Monopoly had kept me from subscribing, I used this opportunity to do some catch up before my non-discounted membership would have started (and which, as a result, I cancelled). In that one month period, I managed to catch up on all the Disney and Pixar films I’d missed over the last two years and to catch up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe offerings herein. I stopped short of beginning Hawkeye as it was releasing weekly and wouldn’t finish by the time my sub expired, so I didn’t want to start in on it. I’ve now ranked the four pre-existing shows here in my order of preference on this as they won’t be getting their own separate articles. We start with the last of the four miniseries/series two release, What If…?.

Based on a popular series of comic books that subverted the normal Marvel timeline to tell interesting stories that might have happened in alternate universes, that concept is employed to great effect in the form of the only animated series among the bunch. They start out simply enough with episodes like “What If…Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?” and “What If…T’Challa Became a Star-Lord?” They get more bizarre as the series progresses, but in the end, they all end up being well with the watch. Great animation work, fascinating stories, and wonderful vocal work make for a very enjoyable 9-episode watch. Also noteworthy as being Chadwick Boseman’s final performance.

WandaVision

The first of the MCU television series set a very high bar for what we should expect from such productions. Wanda Maximoff (Elisabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) find themselves in a 1950s television landscape. The show is black-and-white and the pair play to comedy tropes of that period with great aplomb as the show progresses 9-episode ark, the milieu changes through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, each inspired by a popular television series of the period from The Dick Van Dyke Show through Malcolm in the Middle. That inspiration gives the show much of its comedic heft, allowing audiences familiar with those shows to pick out the elements that most reflect those prior shows.

There is a broader narrative at play here and it comes out in dribbles as the show progresses. While the fourth episode may jump the gun a bit in terms of revelations, the remaining episodes are still fairly strong and the MCU inspiration begins to emerge more and more as it goes on. Olsen and Bettany are superb while Kathryn Hahn steals the show. Teyonah Parris is a nice addition to the MCU while the likes of Debra Jo Rupp, Asif Ali, Jolene Purdy, Emma Caulfield Ford, David Payton, David Lengel and myriad others bring life to the townsfolk in the series. It’s an inventive concept executed rather well.

The Falcon & the Winter Soldier

More in the vein of traditional MCU narratives, The Falcon & the Winter Soldier bring Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson (The Falcon) and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes (formerly the Winter Soldier) into an action narrative that sees a new Captain America while a group of separatists want everything to return to the way it was before the Snap was reversed. As Falcon explores his position as a Black Avenger who can barely trade on his celebrity to help out he and his sister’s (Adepero Oduye) business, he comes to challenge the pervading notion that Captain America must reflect the nation and that the shield should be wielded by a white man.

Bucky, on the other hand, is in forced therapy to help him, overcome the horrors of the brainwashing that made him the Winter Soldier. He’s made friends with one of the individuals on his list of people he must atone to, but cannot seem to bring himself to tell the elderly man that he killed his son in cold blood for simply witnessing his deeds. As Bucky struggles to understand where his place is within the new world order, his frustration with Sam’s decision to let the government use Captain America’s shield to anoint a successor, the pair bond over the course of the series and come to understand how each of them saw their friend Steve Rogers and how they can go about preserving and amplifying his legacy.

Mackie and Stan deliver solid performances in a show that asks and answers challenging questions, but the drama at the heart of the show feels a bit overdone, exploring narrative threads that feel overly familiar even if the thematic ones are fresh. Those themes help elevate the material above its genre origins, which makes for a slow watch, but an ultimately fruitful one.

Loki

The third of the MCU series to release, Loki brings Tom Hiddleston’s trickster god to the small screen in a serio-comedy that, next to What If…?, is the most the more bizarre production. It begins in the conflict at the end of Avengers: Endgame where Loki begins an alternate timeline by stealing the Tesseract. This puts him on the radar of the Time Variance Authority (TVA), an organization devoted to ensuring no alternate timelines are created and that the one “true” timeline stays intact.

As Loki goes on trial for being a Variant, a crime he didn’t know he was committing, a TVA agent (Owen Wilson) agrees to take him under his wing to help the TVA stop an another alternate timeline Loki from further disabling the timelines. However, there’s a different conspiracy going on and Loki agrees to help only to uncover what’s actually going on. As creative and interesting as the narrative is, the show has a strange way of revealing its twists and turns, feeling like they are forcing such revelations rather than letting them flow naturally. Loki, while an interesting character, is also a frustrating one as it’s difficult to actually like him when his selfishness seldom gives way to humanity and when it does, it does so only briefly.

Wilson is solid in his role of a trusting TVA agent trying to keep Loki under control and Gugu Mbatha-Raw does a bang-up job as the head of the TVA, and the sole person who has spoken with the Time-Keepers, who crafted this single timeline and the TVA to prevent it from being subverted. Of course there’s more than meets the eye, but at points, the audience may ultimately lose interest in unraveling the various plot turns.