Creed is the sort of film that realizes the measure of its creation. What Creed so willfully understands about itself is that the wheel does not need to be reinvented. Wheels are crazy amazing. Their genius are so pervasive, they’re too common to even be commonplace. Expertly balanced, the wheels on Creed have the structural integrity to carry us the distance. But young Adonis Creed, the vehicle atop these well tread beauties, provides enough depth and aberration to ensure this film travels beyond an outcome in the ring.

Michael B. Jordan is form fitted for the role of Adonis. Power washing the stink of Fantastic 4 right off him, this is another sterling credential in his exciting young career. Never given over to breathy speeches or melodrama, Jordan comfortably occupies the identity of a man who communicates with his body. I know little about boxing, but the commitment Jordan pours out on screen feels authentic. And in a bit of the expected/unexpected, Creed’s finest performance comes from Sylvester Stallone, his best turn in a decade.

I didn’t have an expectation as to how much Rocky Balboa would be involved with this story, but his is the richest vein in the picture. He never overshadows Adonis, yet he serves as an essential backdrop. Occupying a space between cobwebbed relic and father surrogate, Stallone exercises a kind of simple dignity. Increasingly buried under years of abuse take in the ring, Rocky maintains certainty within his weathered frame. With components both bodily and character driven, Stallone adds unexpected dimensionality to our familiar Stallion.

There is an investment in these characters. It’s no sort of observation to note our leading men are intended to be a film’s bedrock, but Jordan and Stallone seemed consumed with one another. Not due to the drama massaged into their arc, but the mutual identity forged through shadowboxing and speedbag work. There are only so many ways you’ll play a boxing picture, but the relationship at the core of Creed breathes considerable warmth into paces you may know by heart.

Speaking of boxing, Creed looks great. Maryse Alberti’s cinematography moves freely between the sensitivities of young love and over the shoulder tension in the ring without compromising visual identity. Where the Rocky’s of past became increasingly glitzed up, this is a rougher, dimmer effort with just enough naturalistic touches. 

For all its good, Creed leaves unrealized potential on the table. Adonis’s mother, arguably the most transformational figure in his life, spends the entire story a coast away watching events unfold on her television. Bianca—love interest and musician working on some tasty ass tracks—is given little more to work with than the demands of “good woman.” Tessa Thompson is talented enough to take these filaments of character and give Bianca a voice, but there is so much intrigue and excitement surrounding her that goes unfulfilled.

Creed is a story about boxing and identity. Boxing requires technique and repetition, identity is solidified incrementally, and our film is no different. Early on in the film, Adonis stands in a towering image of Rocky projected onto his wall, footage from an old fight, and he mimics a flurry of punches he’s learned after hundreds of viewings. Later in the film Rocky embraces another outsized persona familiar to the franchise, the same kind of knowing tribute fueling Adonis. And through this both men have to come to grips with the the lingering visage of Apollo Creed, an icon casting a long shadow over both lives so deeply affected by man and legend.

Where these things could stumble into tacky homage, they instead seem to be utilized for no reason more complicated than they work. But the fact that it works isn’t enough. Instead this  a completely realized idea about transition. Rocky tells Adonis he can teach him everything he knows about boxing, and the methods remain unchanged, but he reminds Creed that beyond all the footwork and one-armed pushups and sparring there is an elusive something special that sets a great boxer apart.

​The same could be said for any boxing picture, and it's certainly what makes Creed worthy of the name.

—Monte Monreal

Brooklyn plays like the story your grandmother tells about her and your grandfather. Never mind the schmaltz, embroidered details, and oppressive familiarity, Brooklynplays like it knows it’s the story your grandmother tells about her and you grandfather. Half remembered, inflated, the story becomes consumed by its own mythological romance. You can occasionally see the human beings peeking out, but saccharine trimmings mostly obstruct the view.

Where Brooklyn is directed by John Crowley, Nick Hornby is the name cleanly affixed to all the promotional materials. Along with Hornby comes titles like About a Boy, Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, and An Education all just ready to bolster the credibility of any new trailer.

Nick’s particular skill set seems right at home adapting a novel by Colim Toibin. This isn’t Hornby’s first adaptation, An Education is adapted from a memoir by Lynn Barber, but the two exist as almost polar opposites in a parallel universe. Both are stories focused on young woman confronting their identity and sexuality in a changing world, but An Education has something Brooklyn so visibly lacks, teeth. Brooklyn’s feet never quite touch the ground, and try as the film might, even the most outrageous moments (scatological) whimper.

 Our story focuses on Saoirse Ronan as Eillis, a young Irish woman immigrating to America. Where this premise already creaks a bit, the decade is nudged to the 1950’s, and there are no overcrowded tenements, but handsome brownstones on the tree lined streets of post-WWII Brooklyn. Eillis all but had to flee County Wexford back in Ireland because a lack of any real opportunity and she leaves behind her burdened mother and saint of a sister. Arranged by a magnanimous Catholic priest in the States, Ireland is quickly moved into the realm of letters from loved ones read in voice over narrative, and Brooklyn takes center stage.

This opens up the best part of this picture. The story manages to detour its inevitability and this really wonderful character piece glimmers through, if only for a moment. A story of isolation within the abundant promise of a new world, a story about women on their own together, a story about identity in relation to place, and then as all of this exciting potential rests on the horizon, we hit the convergence and head straight into a handsome, slouching young man at a church dance.

It’s not to say the story at the heart of Brooklyn is as wholly one dimensional as boy meets girl, but so much of what we learn about Eillis is portrayed through her relationship to men. She’s confronted with a tragedy back home, and this is where the films grinds to an almost catatonic halt. Where Eillis seemed ready to tell her story, it flattens into a “story of us” as her two worlds—embodied by two competing dudes—wrestle for supremacy. Brooklyn, as Eillis, had so much potential for growth, but it decided to moon over boys instead. An especially unfortunate decision as the moments between Eillis and her sister or mother or roommates or landlady or manager are when Brooklyn uses its voice, and as quickly all of these players are relegated to the margins.

Once the film chooses this path, the orchestra is all but tuned up for the violin tinged embrace. Eillis is tantalized with a few worthy moments, but they’re all bait. Morsels of characterization on a hook leading her down the well paved path to the final credits. She’s imbued with some strength, some domain over her identity, a touch of insight, but these experiences are not used to illuminate her. Instead they all convey her to a relationship, our stand in for resolution. As with any “story of us,” the narrative consumes an actual humanity—or humans for that matter—at the center. The getting (or not getting) together becomes our focus, and the rest is reduced to the gears of a story we’ve heard a million times before. 

—Monte Monreal

Do you ever wonder about James Bond in the space between? Like on all these flights he must take. Or how he copes on a slow Tuesday down at the 00 program. During one portion of Spectre, 007 drives from London to Rome, and does he, you know...have a road trip playlist? Or scarf some beef jerky and Mexican Cokes? Or does he just barrel down the highway, eyes narrowed, gripping the steering wheel? 
 
It's insignificant. I get that, unless, of course, this sociopath is your seatmate on a 12-hour overnighter from Ho Chi Minh City to Paris (he will try and make sex inside you). We like our Bond minutia free. He doesn't need to occupy reality, as his place is unreality, but his unreality is still bound by certain rules. These rules evolved as the Bond monolith ambled through the decades. I've enjoyed this iteration of Bond because it has tried to maintain some sobriety. This Bond chose an unreality a little less unreal than franchises past. Yet, as we arrive at Spectre, as they herd the Craig era Bond films into the barn, they broke the rules. They've compromised their established unreality. 

The more the cracks show in Spectre, the more we're confronted with a Bond who seems out of place in his environs. Spectre has two real problems: one is in the machinery of the story, while the other exists off camera. In a moment, Bond is caught inside a crumbling building and, as he falls to his certain demise, he just kind of lands on a couch. It's somehow on top of a pile of rubble instead of underneath. It’s all too easy. No one seems up for the challenge.
 
Where this was telegraphed pretty plainly in Daniel Craig’s press junket—he was being a pill—our guy phones it in real good and hard. His suffocating indifference may have been complex character work, but it’s more like he wants this all to be over. Sam Mendes’s direction is uninspired. The five (five? five.) writers on-boarded for this project can’t find any interesting stones to overturn. And more painfully, there are so many clumsy nods to Bond films of yore, so many indulgent nudges and winks that I'm cringing while I type. It's all almost cringe inducing enough to overtake the graceless story building and ill-conceived effort to tie all the Craig era Bond films together. Almost. 
 
No one walks into a Bond movie and expects unfettered artistic genius. There's a latitude these pictures occupy, but in that people expect some tension, spectacle, suspense, and fun. Spectre’s troubles are less about an inability to deliver those broad pleasures but coming off as though it forgot how.

The Day of the Dead sequence before the opening credits (re: opening credits—oh, the tentacle porn references set to spring forth from middling Spectre reviews) is delicious. And there's a giddy action piece in the Austrian mountains, but the rest of the film never quite ignites. And the more the film grabs for some elusive spark, the more the film works its way into a shallow and un-fun place. Even Christoph Waltz is joyless, and I'm not even sure how that happens. 
 
Bond will live again, and the Craig stretch did a lot of good for a sickly franchise. How it's tweaked in the next few years to make it seem new again, we’ll have to wait and see. This Bond got tired of itself, and Spectre is a disappointing final note. Homage, “the Bond formula” and incredulous plot points have diminished what this now-shuttered era of Bond worked so aptly against. And when an impeccable figure of unreality like Bond's world is breached, the experience tumbles down with it.

After that, all you're left with are very relevant questions about how Bond copes with jet lag. 

​—Monte Monreal