One thing I have noticed about the scripts of Akhil Paul, one of the makers of the new Tovino Thomas starrer Identity, is how he notices certain peculiar things in stuff we see almost regularly. In movies like 7th Day and Forensic, he has used those details to deceive the audience or to deceive certain characters. When it comes to Identity, his third film as a writer and second film as a director, along with Anas Khan, the ambition is really huge. But somewhere, the convolutions of the story from being a simple revenge story to an almost Mission Impossible-level tragedy evading heroic thriller tires you. And rather than making us figure out how it all unfolded more subtly, Akhil and Anas are explaining everything less enticingly. While a part of you do appreciate the movie for being ambitious with the scale, the over-explained, complicated script reduces the wow factor of the film.

The trailer of the movie has not really revealed much about the film. So, I will try to keep it spoiler-free. But some spillings will be there, so be cautious. Haran Shankar is our hero who lives with his two sisters. Haran, who lived with his abusive father till the age of seven, has developed a very obsessive character trait. And since his late mother was a sketch artist in the police force, Haran knows the science of that as well. What we see in Identity are the events that happen in the life of Haran when a Bengaluru-based police officer becomes his neighbor in his apartment. The police officer is accompanied by a witness who is experiencing face blindness after a hit-and-run incident. How the sketch artist capabilities of Haran help these two and how that journey unfolds is what we see in Identity.

The agenda of the bad guy in this movie is so elaborate and meticulous that while I was driving back home after watching the movie, I was trying to think about the story in a linear way. So, when you look at the story from a linear point of view, the hero almost becomes a character who happens to be in a subplot of the villain’s story. See, people like Christopher Nolan and Dennis Villeneuve have also gone after complicated scripting methods to make the movie compelling for the viewers. Forget foreign films, one of my absolute favorites of last year, Kishkindha Kaandam, also made a linear story complicated to give us that cinematic high. The issue I felt with Identity is that the complications in the story and when they eventually get revealed, it feels more like a deliberate distraction rather than a well-crafted twist.

In terms of using minute details about professions or medical conditions, the writing is definitely great. From facial blindness to sketch artist psychology, and to flight protocols, one can see that the director duo have done really good research in bringing authenticity to subplots and set pieces they have imagined. But somewhere, I felt the theatrical euphoria you associate with the revealing of a twist was just not there in the directorial aspect of the film. And I feel a larger part of that is because of the spoon-feeding exposition through dialogues. We are not picking information from the scenes. It is more like we are getting informed about what really happened literally by some character.

The wider aspect ratio of the film gives it the option to make things look grand and slightly larger than life. And Akhil George plays with the color palette pretty effectively to give sequences a particular mood. A lot of back and forth is happening in the movie to reveal the twists, and Chaman Chacko uses aggressive cuts to make those portions work. The production quality of some of the chase sequences is pretty good. While the fight inside the flight made absolute sense, and the execution was really impressive, the car chase sequence felt slightly outlandish.

Tovino Thomas tries to follow this stiff body language to show the precision obsession of his character. While that style looked very stylish whenever he does that, along with dialogues, in the initial portions of the movie where he is mostly silent, that body language somewhat reminded me of Small Wonder. In an interview, when Akhil Paul was asked about the casting of Trisha in the film, he was sincere enough to say that the bigger budget of the movie made them cast a bigger name to widen the market. Well, that very much gives you an idea. Her character, Alisha, is important to the story. But in terms of scope to perform, it offers minimal opportunity to the actor. Vinay Rai, in his typical style, carries the tone shifts of the character effectively. After a point, Allen Jacob was all about swagger. Shammi Thilakan was perhaps the only performer who was able to reduce the rigidness of the dialogues through his dialog rendering. Aju Varghese gets a police role we really don’t see him play often.

In terms of scale and imagination, Identity definitely has managed to pull off an appreciable output on screen. At a time when people are willing to decode things on their own after watching a film, I thought a bit more refinement on a writing level would have made Identity a quality film by all means. Similar to what I said about Marco, despite these movies having shortcomings or issues, it is really promising to see that within the constraints of having a small market, our makers are trying ambitious stuff.

After watching Christy Hall’s Daddio earlier this year and Halina Reijn’s Babygirl out this month, it’s clear that Hollywood has moved on from #metoo to conventional passion and eroticism in filmmaking.

After all the controversy over sexism, sexuality and power imbalances, one would assume female writers and directors would fully embrace the female gaze and make use of the collective step forward in our cultural narrative.

But both Daddio and now Babygirl make me feel like the opposite is happening — that women behind the camera are enabling the male gaze instead. And its not even in a satirical way either, but more of a resigned acceptance, strangely enough.

Twenty-five years following Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Nicole Kidman returns to erotic drama with Babygirl as protagonist Romy Mathis, the CEO of a major tech-based corporation in contemporary New York City. At work and at home, she’s a successful and dedicated businesswoman, wife and mother.

But in private, she wishes that she could fulfill her sexual desires. When one of the new interns, confident and attractive Samuel (Harris Dickinson), shows an interest in Romy, she thinks he might be able to understand her needs in bed in ways her husband, playwright Jacob (Antonio Banderas), doesn’t.

Esther-Rose McGregor and Vaughan Reilly play Romy’s young daughters, and Sophie Wilde co-stars as her dedicated colleague.

In the promotion fo Babygirl, I was surprised Reijn didn’t name Jane Campion or Sofia Coppola as directors who have influenced her work, and mostly listed the more infamous male filmmakers of the 1980s erotic thrillers, like Paul Verhoeven, Brian De Palma and Adrian Lyne. But after watching Babygirl, it makes sense. There is virtually no message or theme to the film other than “giving into your immoral temptations might lead to consequences.”

None of the characters are interesting or likeable enough to follow for two hours, let alone deserve being redeemed by the end. Decisions by the characters are overly convenient to move the plot along, and the lack of male nudity compared to the graphic female nudity is distracting, especially from a film being marketed as erotica “for women.”

It feels like Reijn just enjoys shooting provocative sequences and not much else. It isn’t even that sexy or shocking. It left me wondering, “What’s the point? Some people can’t help being horny?” You could just go back and watch Campion’s The Piano (1993), Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) or Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981) again if you want effective, well-executed eroticism in cinema.

Most disappointing to me are the two leads of Babygirl, both generally talented and mesmerizing, who have been better in other films. I felt Banderas was also wasted and underwritten as the perplexed, devoted husband.

Babygirl has an interesting plot and good cast, but it’s eroticism ultimately leads nowhere.

Historical fiction is what’s happening at the movies this week, with a side serving of current events in two more features. The big, plush beach-read epic among them is The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas’ adventure classic being given an extravagant new three-hour visualization by the French writing-directing team of Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patelliere. Pierre Niney of Frantz and Yves Saint Laurent plays Edmond Dantes, a sailor of humble origin made good, until a jealous rival has him framed as an agent of the exiled Napoleon. Years later, he escapes an island prison and poses as a wealthy foreigner to insinuate himself into the worlds of the three men (Bastien Bouillon, Laurent Lafitte, Patrick Mille) who’d orchestrated his fate—and have profited from more crimes since.

Even with its narrative somewhat altered and compacted from Dumas’ sprawling original (which was first published as a serial between 1844-46), this remains a flamboyantly old-fashioned tale of credulity-stretching intrigue and coincidence. We seldom see its like on the big screen anymore—or maybe we do, but these days it’s more likely to take the overtly fantastical form of a Batman movie or the like. This lavish production does not shy from going over-the-top in its ostentatious settings, flashy drone shots or bombastic orchestral score. Still, it all pretty much works, particularly once the elaborate revenge scheme kicks in around mid-point.

It’s period popcorn entertainment on a grand scale, no less enjoyable for being more than a bit theatrically shameless. The Count of Monte Cristo begins opening around the Bay Area on January 3; likely SF venues (not yet confirmed at presstime) were the AMC Kabuki and Metreon.

As strikingly bleak in its handsome B&W austerity as The Count is eye-candy colorful, The Girl With the Needle from Danish director Magnus von Horn (whose prior Sweat we reviewed here) weaves fictional elements around a shocking criminal case from a century ago. In 1919 Copenhagen, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is a clothing-factory seamstress whose husband hasn’t come back from WWI service, and may well be dead. She is seduced by her wealthy boss (Jorgen Fjelstrup), but any dreams of a wealthy, stable future with him get squelched by a first/last meeting with his imperious mother.

Now pregnant and desperate, with legal abortion not an option, Karoline finds herself aided by a stranger met by chance. Middle-aged Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) seems to be in the business of helping just such poor young women, and placing their unwanted children in “good homes.” But it is not until she’s become an integral part of Dagmar’s ongoing operation that Karoline realizes her benefactress is secretly a monster—a sort of matricidal equivalent to Sweeney Todd. It is that figure who’s based on a real-life one, her trial leading to major changes in child-protective laws; and the formidable Dyrholm is impressive as always in the role.

But primary focus here is on fictive Karoline, who is not very interesting or even terribly sympathetic. The facts on record are so much more powerful than what von Horn chooses to portray, his choices end up seeming rather inscrutable, despite the film’s compelling atmosphere and aesthetics. It’s an arresting exercise in many respects that nonetheless proves somewhat frustrating. Girl opens Fri/3 at SF’s Roxie, with other Bay Area venues to follow.

Taking place a few years earlier on the far opposite ends of Eurasia is Harbin from South Korean writer-director Woo Min-ho, of prior hit political thrillers Inside Men and The Man Standing Next. It’s set in 1909, four years after a multinational treaty forced Korea to basically become a colony of Japan following the latter’s winning the Russo-Japanese War. Abandoned by allies (including the US), nationalists formed resistance groups to combat the encroachment of further Japanese imperialism, among them the Korean Independence Army. Ahn (Hyun Bin) is fighting in their ranks when they score a combat victory over some surprised Nippon troops. But he insists on honoring international war-crimes rules by not executing some captured personnel, despite his own men’s objections. That turns out to be a bitterly regretted decision, because spared high-ranking officer Mori (Park Hoon) soon seizes an opportunity to massacre nearly all Ahn’s comrades.

To redeem himself, Ahn decides he’ll make it his mission to assassinate Japan’s Prime Minister as he travels across China to meet with Russian diplomats, orchestrating deals that will secure Korea’s subjugation. This involves a labyrinth of undercover intrigue, arms acquisition, betrayal, shootouts, and so forth, with a mole conveying most of these planned guerrilla actions to the relentless Mori before they can occur.

Dense with background details and explication that may be somewhat daunting to non-Korean audiences, Harbin nonetheless maintains interest with a somber, tense mood spiked by occasional outbursts of violence. It’s handsomely produced on impressive locations, from spectacular mountain and desert landscapes to myriad interiors whose dark look amplifies the surreptitious nature of the characters’ activities. A history lesson framed as heroic action-suspense tale, Harbin may for Western viewers recall starry big-budget WW2 espionage epics of the 1960s like Where Eagles Dare and Von Ryan’s Express—though it’s a bit less heavy on the swaggering machismo. It opens in Bay Area theaters Fri/3.

Another fact-inspired new drama has gotten a divisive response, with raves and awards from some quarters, while others have found it curiously alienating. I’m sorry to say I landed on the debit side of that divide—sorrier still because the source material seemed such a natural for the screen. Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel The Nickel Boys provided a succinctly powerful portrait of slavery long after the official end of slavery, via abuses visited on boys at a very long-running fictive Florida boys’ reform school (in real life the now-shuttered Dozier School). Its protagonist gets sent there unjustly as a juvenile in the early 1960s, and is lucky to survive the experience. Much later, he lives to see the institution investigated, uncovering decades of brutality including rape, beatings, and the unmarked graves of former wards who supposedly “ran away” or simply “disappeared.”

Nickel Boys (the “the” has been dropped) is a first narrative feature for RaMell Ross, who previously had turned his sojourn teaching photography in rural Alabama into a fine poetical documentary of life there. Hale County This Morning, This Evening was oblique but evocative, offering little in the way of concrete storytelling yet providing heady, lyrical insight into a place and culture.

But Whitehead’s book is full of vivid incident, character dynamics, and historical context; it’s not the sort of thing that lends itself to flavorful abstraction. Whatever led Ross to make the decisions he makes, they didn’t work for me: He has shot this intensely dramatic story entirely in the first-person, initially limited to the perspective of teenaged Elmwood (Ethan Herisse), then also that of Turner (Brandon Wilson), who becomes his only real friend at the dreaded “Nickel Academy.”

Their travails rendered murky by a POV in which we see the abuser, but not the abused (Ross and Joslyn Barnes’ screenplay tends to leave those acts to our imagination anyway), this is a movie whose high-minded experimentalism ends up only muffling the impact of its material. The effect is rather like reading a novel entirely written in the second person: It’s a gimmick that can be pulled off, yes, but why would you want to? The performers (also including Daveed Diggs, Hamish Linklater, and Jimmie Fails) are good, albeit handicapped by the alienating technique. Some, like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood’s grandmother, succumb to overstatement when repeatedly asked to play entire scenes directly to the camera, rather than a fellow actor.

The external threads Ross weaves in (often utilizing archival footage) involving the concurrent Civil Rights movement, “space race” etc. do ultimately pay off in making this long sit achieve a kind of complex, essayistic dimensionality. But those 15 minutes or so of Chris Marker-like montage succeed at the cost of The Nickel Boys, which will have to wait for a more straightforward future translation to realize the impact that fairly leapt off Whitehead’s pages, and which should have provided no obstacle to replication in this medium. It opens in Bay Area theaters Fri/3.

More direct depictions of grave present-tense injustices are on display in two more new films. Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s Porcelain War centers on three Ukrainian artists living in the vicinity of devastated Kharkiv, very near the Russian border. Originally they’d all lived in Crimea, yet another “life stolen from us by Russia’s occupation.” Finding themselves in a new war zone, they maintain their disciplines as a form of protest: Cinematographer Andrey Stefanov keeps filming, including the mines and IUD’s now littering their countryside, while married couple Leontyev and Anya Stasenko continue creating ceramic miniatures that now offer commentary on this nation’s appalling day-to-day reality.

Occasionally bringing those whimsical figures to “life” via animation, Porcelain Nation can seem a bit twee, particularly when compared to the many more bluntly powerful documentaries about Ukraine the last couple years. But in its second half, the film acquires some power of its own, as we watch Slava train as a weapons expert for the Ukrainian Special Forces, and Andrey must cope with sending his children into exile for their own safety. There’s even gritty you-are-there footage of combat missions. Ultimately, the film’s strength lies in showing how art can retain its relevance, and artists their artistry, under the most antagonistic circumstances.

Likewise, From Ground Zero: Stories From Gaza is not the most hard-hitting of recent features about Palestinians’ plight, but it benefits from a diversity of approach to a grim subject. Conceived by Rashid Masharawi, the project brings together 22 filmmakers for as many individual contributions to a nearly two-hour omnibus reflecting everyday life in Gaza. As amply demonstrated here, that life is to a large degree now spent in refugee camps, or combing through the debris of homes newly bombed to rubble—sometimes still hoping to find survivors buried beneath.

There are sequences that are straight documentary reportage, others more in the realm of personal essay, plus a fair number of dramatized vignettes. In lighter moments, we see a standup comedian provide some escapist relief for refugees; animation and marionettes are utilized elsewhere.

Not everything here is good, with a wince-worthy moment or two, as during a bit that’s like a tacky amateur music video on YouTube. But the immediacy of so many voices in front of and behind the cameras does generate considerable insight. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved when at one point various children are interviewed, and one notes that her baby brother hasn’t yet acquired the power of speech—his experience to date has only taught him to imitate the sound of an ambulance siren.

Porcelain War and From Ground Zero both open Fri/3 at SF’s Roxie Theater, the former also at the Rafael Film Center in Marin.