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:

Last Night in Soho

There are certain directors that you always expect a fascinatingly original premise from and each new project delivers even if the quality sometimes vacillates between projects. Edgar Wright is one such director. While most don’t remember his directorial debut Fistful of Fingers, his second theatrical release, Hot Fuzz set him on a road to fame among fans of British comedy. With that film and the remaining two pictures in his Cornetto trilogy, he established his bona fides.

Last Night in Soho isn’t a comedy his early films. it’s a serious drama like his prior outing, Baby Driver. Set in modern London, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) is an up-and-coming fashion designer who’s made the journey from small town England to the big city to pursue her dreams discovering that people there aren’t necessarily better. One night in her dreams, she walks into the 1960s and the body of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) an up-and-coming chanteuse who ends up in the wily grasp of promoter Jack (Matt Smith) who convinces her to take on work at a local men’s club where she becomes stuck. As Eloise revisits this dream over successive nights, she begins adapting her own personal style from clothing to hair based on Sandie’s influence and it ultimately bleeds into her fashion designs.

However, all is not the glossy dream world she believes it to be as she begins to see fractures of her own reality, the past blending into the present and she begins to suspect that Sandie’s boyfriend may have murdered her and she suspects that an old man at the bar she begins working at (Terence Stamp) may be the real Jack, which fuels her suspicions. Eloise begins trying to unravel the mystery as her own psyche starts to fracture and history threatens to repeat itself as her mother’s death was a direct result of her own untreated psychosis.

The film’s production is gorgeous as Wright’s films have become known. Embodying the glamour and grit of the 1960s and London’s sex trade of the period, Last Night in Soho is a visual wonder further enhanced by Chung-hoon Chung’s photography using mirrors to reflect Eloise’s dream self and put her into an otherworldly frame of mind. McKenzie and Taylor-Joy are tremendous, but the real class act here is Diana Rigg as the proprietor of a hostel Eloise eventually moves into. Rigg’s performance is among the best she’s ever given and it’s a shame that didn’t translate into an Oscar nomination.

Death on the Nile

There are certain authors whose books demand regular adaptations, not because prior works were inferior, but because they are popular enough to support multiple attempts. That said, Agatha Christie’s novels aren’t easily re-adapted. There’s the thorny issue of the mystery already being known. Unlike books like Little Women and Pride & Prejudice, these stories work out the same way. They aren’t enigmas needing solved. Whereas murder mysteries lose something in multiple attempts because everyone knows the end. It’s why something like Citizen Kane or The Sixth Sense couldn’t easily be re-done because half the fun is getting to the end. Death on the Nile is the second attempt by Kenneth Branagh to re-adapt Christie’s novels and, more so than Murder on the Orient Express, the result is a mixed bag.

One thing Branagh’s films have done well is evoking a sense of glamor and style. Death on the Nile is nothing if not luxurious and those scenes set in the desert or along the Nile are gorgeously filmed and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos neds to be lauded for them. That said, his interiors are often either poorly lit or ghastly lit, neither in equal measure. A climactic scene near the end of the film is so dark that it begs the question: why? A sense of suspense? That could be done quite easily without an atonally ham-fisted moment.

If you’ve seen the John Gillermin original, you have little reason to catch this reboot. The mystery, once spoiled, isn’t easy to forget and like Murder on the Orient Express, it’s among the best known of Christie’s works. Is the desire to bring new viewers to Christie’s novels? I can’t see how that’s possible. I suppose now that Branagh is so far removed form his Shakespearean period, he has to try something else, but for the second time in as many films, he’s failed to improve upon the original.

Sure, there’s a twist for the third murder in the film as it’s not who’s expected and the familiar Captain Hastings who features prominently in the book and the first film is utterly absent this time out, replaced by a character from Murder on the Orient Express for reasons indefensible. The tweaks to characters to give them a more modernistic feel is refreshing, but mishandled. The modernism doesn’t quite feel anachronistic, which is a blessing, but not all of the changes work. The best example of this is the Sophie Okonedo character. I don’t know if they cast Okonedo and expected her to sing like a 20s jazz artist and she couldn’t or if they always intended to take old jazz recordings and put her face to the voice of others, but it’s handled in such a way that the poor sound quality feels utterly out of place for a film as polished as this one otherwise is.

The least said about Branagh’s vain attempts to re-write Hercule Poirot’s story by making him a war hero as well as introducing a love interest, the better. The rest of the cast is relatively game and kudos especially to Russell Brand, Dawn French, and Jennifer Saunders for their performances.

Joker

There’s a lot of drama in playing the character of Joker? He’s the arch-nemesis of Batman and is a certifiable psychopath. In his various incarnations, he’s always been played with a manic flair, but the evolution of the character has been an increasingly bleak prospect. Caesar Romero was the least psychotic of the incarnations in the 1960s television series. Jack Nicholson took him to a bit more crazy lengths in 1989’s Batman, but he was still a relatively comical villain. Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance in The Dark Knight was about as unhinged as one can get while still being a cold-blooded, calculating psychopath. Then there’s Jaoquin Phoenix here in Joker. He also won the Oscar and it’s not difficult to see why.

For their re-invention of the character, director and co-writer Todd Phillips along with writing partner Scott Silver have made him an unlikeable person who suffers from psychological impairment for reasons eventually explained near the film’s conclusion. Rather than being a criminal mastermind like he is in the comics, Phillips and Silver try to make him an empathetic figure. A mentally unbalanced man beaten and mistreated for so long than he lashes out with violence. It’s an interesting attempt to explain his psychoses, but it’s done in such a predictable way, the audience is left to wonder whether they should feel bad for him or not. The film clearly makes the case for him being a semi-sympathetic figure, but in reality, his actions are little more than inappropriate responses to admittedly terrible incidents that pushed him over the edge.

Phoenix plays up these elements quite well and it’s a transformational performance, but compared to Ledger and Nicholson in the roles, his feels like an utterly inferior version of the character. This is a very difficult film to review. It isn’t that the film is bad. It’s well made. The problem is that the first hour are a slog, an unrelentingly bleak slog. Joker isn’t the byproduct of bad situations as the film suggests. Rather, he’s given over to allowing his darker instincts to thrive. He’s a villain who’s created by an unjust system, but he’s also a character who takes the path of least resistance, refuses to repent for his actions, and ultimately the audience is told that they must feel some measure of pity for him and support his attempts to lash out at those around him. He’s a reformer, an inspirer of the worst in people. It’s a fine line that the film walks between justifying his abhorrent acts and celebrating them when, in reality, we shouldn’t be identifying with him. We shouldn’t be finding reasons to understand him. Strength of character is not giving into your baser instincts and hurting others even when you’ve been harmed. His isn’t a figure to idolize even though there will be some who will. Be very concerned about anyone who would.