To say that relative newcomer Mikey Madison gives a breakthrough performance in the title role is an understatement—it feels as though she’s been shot out of a cannon, fully formed and ready to conquer the world. (I loved her as Pamela Adlon’s precocious daughter in Better Things, but I had no idea she could do this.)

Madison’s Anora—she prefers to go by Ani—is an exotic dancer at a strip club in Manhattan. There may be no sex in the Boom-Boom room but there’s lots of grinding and groping. Ani confidently prances from man to man at the club, sidling up to them, flirting, offering a private dance, which they rarely refuse.

The work seems dangerous but Ani is clearly not afraid—and her tough-New-York-girl persona plays a significant role in the film.

One night, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the layabout, party-boy son of an oligarch, comes into the club with his entourage, asking if any of the dancers speak Russian. It turns out that Ani’s grandmother is Russian so she understands the language completely and speaks it haltingly. She’s assigned to their table.

Ivan is immediately smitten with her—although he’s a horny and drunk 21 year old; he’d probably be smitten by a sex-bot—and when Ani takes him to the private room he cheerfully announces, “I loooooove America!”

Ivan (aka Vanya) is skinny and cute with a mop of shaggy hair—he’s been called the Russian Timothée Chalamet—and he has the happy-go-lucky demeanor of a child in a neverending toy store.

He eventually invites Ani to his home and it’s not just any home—it’s an enormous mansion, complete with an elevator, a full bar, daily maid service, and a garage filled with fancy cars. When he’s not drinking, getting high, or playing video games, Ivan is fond of skidding around the polished wood floor like he’s on skates. He also loves sex, especially sex with Ani, so he makes a proposal.

He’ll pay her $10,000 to spend the week with him, as his girlfriend.

She counters with $15,000, which he agrees to.

He then cracks that she shouldn’t have accepted any less than $30,000. (This was the explicit reference to Pretty Woman that sealed my theory.)

The first hour or so of Anora plays like a dream—as Ivan and Ani have sex, get high, and cavort around the city. Ivan’s charmingly broken English and wide-eyed glee over, well, pretty much everything, makes him a uniquely amusing and nonthreatening companion.

“Isn’t my life freaking great?” he basically says at all times—and who could argue?

So Ani agrees to fly out with him to Vegas, which is where he impulsively asks her to marry him (are there any other kinds of proposals in Vegas?). He means it, he insists—he loves her, and if they get married he’ll be able to stay in America and piss off his parents.

Even this tough girl, with her armor of New York cool, can’t help but to be swept off her feet and she agrees. They get married at the Little White Wedding Chapel. She quits her job and moves in with him.

It’s all a beautiful dream—Alice in Oligarch World—and we know it can’t last, but we enjoy it all the same. (When Ani tells a friend from the club that she hopes Ivan will take her to Disney Land, a childhood dream, my heart broke a little bit.)

Then word gets to Ivan’s parents back in Russian that their son married a “hooker” and they call upon their network of associates in New York to get the marriage annulled.

First two henchmen, an impatient Armenian (Vache Tovmasyan) and a sad-eyed Russian (Yura Borisov), show up and muscle their way into the home. In a panic, Ivan runs, leaving Ani behind. This is our first indication that their love may not quite be as enduring as we might’ve hoped.

Ani puts up a fight—scratching, clawing, throwing things, anything to get these guys away from her. They’re scared of her; they weren’t expecting such ferocity—she even breaks the Armenian’s nose—but they are finally able to subdue her.

They are then joined by the boss, a local handler named Toros (Karren Karagulian), who seems very anxious about landing on the wrong side of the Ivan’s father’s wrath. (We know how oligarchs handle their enemies in Russia.)

In fact, all the Russian mercenaries seem panicked. They must find Ivan and get that marriage annulled. So they pile into a Cadillac SUV, a furious Ani in tow, trying to find a drunk Russian boy in the city.

This is all played for laughs, albeit laughs with an undercurrent of menace. Much as we know Ani can take care of herself, these thugs mean business. So the film turns into an absurdist dark comedy as Ani and her Russian henchmen search for Ivan, sharing his pictures like he’s a kid on a milk carton. Ani still hopes against hope that it’s all been a misunderstanding, that Ivan will come to her rescue, that their love with endure.

At the end of Pretty Woman, the sex worker lands the multimillionaire. But we fear there will be no happily ever after for Ani. We simply hope she can survive the night.

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Early in The Bikeriders, the new film about a Chicago bike gang in the late ’60s, we see truck driver Johnny (Tom Hardy) watching The Wild Ones on TV at home with his wife. He chuckles approvingly when Brando’s Johnny, asked what he’s rebelling against, replies, “Whatya got?”—and he repeats the line out loud, imitating Brando’s shrugging swagger. He decides to become the leader of a motorcycle “club” (he never calls it a gang) of his own.

They call themselves The Vandals and are fond of wearing leather jackets (or open denim or leather vests), heavy boots, and bandanas tied like headbands, but never helmets. Defying, or even courting, death is part of the allure for these guys. The leather jackets have The Vandals logo on the back (referred to as “colors” by the members) and a patch with a hand giving the finger on the front. Whatya got?

The Bikeriders takes place in the late ’60s and early ’70s, a transitional time in American culture. In the beginning, Johnny and his crew look like greasers, the sort we might associate with The Lords of Flatbush. Eventually, as their ranks grow, the hair gets longer, the beards scruffier, and the drug of choice shifts from beer and whiskey to marijuana. Johnny, who has an increasingly antiquated code of honor, risks being left behind.

The film is based on Danny Lyon’s striking, elegiac photobook of the same title and Mike Faist, who’s suddenly everywhere these days (not complaining!), plays the Danny character here, conducting interviews with the bikers and their girls, and lurking on the outskirts of the action, taking photos.

Director Jeff Nichols absolutely brings the book to life, capturing not just the style, machismo, and scuzziness of these disenfranchised men, but their primal need to be a part of something larger than themselves and the hint of melancholy that lurks just beneath their bravado.

The film starts with a wonderful burst of Scorsese-like brio. Young Benny (Austin Butler) is at a bar, wearing his colors. We find out that the other Vandals don’t wear their colors when they’re not all together because they fear getting jumped or arrested or worse. Benny has no such fear. When a couple of regulars tell him to take his jacket off, he says, “You’d have to kill me to get this jacket off”—an invitation to violence if ever I’ve heard one. And violence is what he gets. It seems to follow Benny around.

We learn about Benny from Kathy (Jodie Comer), the woman who will eventually become his wife—and who serves as our primary narrator. Comer, the British actress who shot to fame after her role as a captivating contract killer in Killing Eve, is great here. Her Kathy is a tragi-comic figure, filled with wry and humorous observations about the boys and their rituals, always delivered with a thick Chicago accent, while desperate to get Benny to give up the lifestyle.

The Bikeriders is set up as a battle for Benny’s soul, with Johnny, who sees his younger counterpart as a natural successor, facing off against Kathy, who sees the path Benny is on and just wants him to live.

But the biggest problem with The Bikeriders, I’m afraid, is Benny himself. Not so much Butler’s performance—his leonine handsomeness is used to great affect here—but the character, as written. We see from the very start that Benny is kind of a sociopath—refusing to take off that jacket, smiling in the face of violence, always the first to throw a punch. Even his romantic streak is a little suspect: He woos Kathy by standing outside her house until he scares away her boyfriend and makes himself at home.

If anything, it’s Johnny, played with Brando-esque mumbly gravitas by Hardy, who earns our respect. When a fellow member dies, he brings The Vandals to line up in a somber, military-style procession outside the funeral home. He doesn’t blink when the mother of his fallen brother spits on him.

The relationship between Benny and Kathy is also undercooked. We see very little of their marriage, beyond her pleading with him to give up the gang. She’s attracted to him, sure—when she first spots him, he’s leaning over a pool table at a bar, from which he rises, smolderingly. (Butler is shot with the kind of appreciative gaze generally reserved for women.) But what else?

To the film’s credit, Kathy is not depicted as a nag, but rather someone smart enough to see that things will end badly. The threat of violence and death hangs over these men—and the film—at all times. And yet, she’s the only female character that gets any kind of interior life. This film is a boy’s club in every sense of the phrase.

The Bikeriders is beautifully shot and acted but it has a bit of a screenplay problem. It traffics in mythology more than characters. I didn’t really care about Benny and Kathy as a couple because I didn’t feel like I real knew them. But man, they do look good on the back of a motorcycle.

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In Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, set in 1970 at the fictitious Barton Academy in New England, we certainly have a strict teacher. He’s Paul Giamatti’s Paul Hunham, who teaches ancient history to a group of thoroughly disengaged students. Hunham, who has working class roots, resents his young charges, who are wealthy and entitled. He’s a textbook misanthrope—drinks too much, has no wife or kids, prefers ancient times to the present. He also has a lazy eye (his colleagues call him “that wall-eyed bastard”) and a condition that leaves him with an unpleasant, fish-like body odor. It’s no wonder he hates his life—and seems downright gleeful when he doles out Ds and F-minuses to his class.

One student, however, manages to get a B+. That’s Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sessa). But Angus isn’t earnest or innocent. He’s almost as surly as Professor Hunham—he’s full-of-himself in the way that only really smart high school boys can be; he has no friends, he constantly gets into fights.

As winter break approaches, Angus is looking forward to heading out to St. Kitts with his mother and her new husband. He boasts that he has the same swimming trunks as James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Then, a call from his mother ruins everything: She wants to spend time alone with her husband, and Angus has essentially been disinvited.

Suddenly he finds himself among the losers and stragglers left behind at school—the holdovers. And, you guessed it, Professor Hunham is the luckless teacher in charge of this luckless bunch.

The Barton Academy of 1970 is rendered perfectly here—from the patrician portraits gazing down at the students; to the imposing, polished wood dining halls; to the snow-covered fields where one might stumble across a stray football; to the Loden coats and wide-wale corduroys favored by Hunham and massive sideburns favored by the younger professors. The folk music adds to the 1970s vibe, although I was tricked into thinking that the wistful “Silver Joy” by Damien Jurado (born in 1972!) was period appropriate.

There’s a third major figure here—cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), whose son has died in the Vietnam War. Her son was a scholarship student at Barton and Hunham genuinely admired him. This is our first indication that it truly is the casual privilege of the boys that offends Hunham the most (he gets in big trouble for flunking a Senator’s son). He wants the boys to be grateful for their opportunities and as passionate about knowledge as he is. He also has great affection for Mary, or as much as he can muster in light of his anti-social tendencies. She’s a big-hearted woman, a natural caregiver, but she carries the burden of her son’s death at all times. It makes her wary and a bit weary.

Angus does, in fact, come from money, but he’s not carefree like so many of the other boys. He’s been kicked out of three schools (one more and he’s going to military academy, with a direct path to Vietnam). He’s bitter, depressed, confrontational. It seems to have something to do with his father, who is mysteriously out of the picture.

Ultimately, the remaining boys will go on a ski trip, leaving Angus, Hunham, and Mary behind. And it’s Mary who will remind Hunham that Angus may be an asshole but he’s also just a boy missing his family at Christmas. Her humanity will begin to rub off on him.

Yes, they will form a kind of unconventional family—a fatherless boy; a mother without a son; a man secretly craving human connection. It’s sentimental, but in a measured way. Hunham and Angus will stay prickly and combative for much of the film—but eventually they will grow close.

The Holdovers’ sharp writing and expert sense of place is matched by its pitch-perfect performances. Giamatti, working with Payne for a second time since Sideways, is honestly a national treasure at this point—he’s the Michael Jordan of playing curmudgeons—and Randolph is revelatory as the kind, sad Mary. As for newcomer Sessa, he doesn’t beg us to love him, which somehow makes his character all the more lovable. Wry, funny (with some zingers that will stay with you long after the film is over), and closely observed, The Holdovers is my kind of Christmas film.

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As a filmmaker—in such works as Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, and The Virgin Suicides—she has focused almost exclusively on innocence lost, on young girls stripped of their agency and thrust into worlds they’re not ready for.

It’s facile, obviously, to make the connection—there’s much more to Sofia Coppola, as an artist and as a person, than this bit of her biography. But that’s sort of the point. The young women she examines on screen—both fictional and real—all have interior lives that are rarely considered, much less explored by the world. Coppola aims to rectify that.

In that sense, Priscilla Presley, the focus of her latest feature, is the perfect Coppola subject. When you think of Priscilla Presley, what comes to mind? That she was pretty. That she married Elvis young. That her own life has been marked by tragedy (the loss of an ex-husband, grandson, and daughter). Rarely have we asked ourselves: What was it like for her to be courted by the most famous man in the world? Who really was she? (And rarely have we considered that she took Elvis’ flagging fortune after he died and turned it into an empire.)

When we meet her, she’s just 14. And Cailee Spaeny, the talented newcomer who plays Priscilla with a mixture of wide-eyed wonder and roiling strength, was at least partly cast because she looks so young. She’s at a diner on a base camp in Germany, where Elvis is fulfilling his military service, when she’s approached by a friend of Elvis’ inviting her to a house party.

The friend is a military man, and married, making him somehow less threatening, and it’s that veneer of respectability that ultimately convinces Priscilla’s parents (Dad is an army officer) to let her go. But what exactly is going on here? Why did Elvis’ friend approach Priscilla to begin with? Was he sent to stake out pretty American girls in Germany? Was he specifically looking for pretty young girls?

Coppola never answers that question, but it’s clear that Priscilla’s innocence is a huge part of what draws Elvis (Jacob Elordi) to her.

When Priscilla arrives at the party, in a babydoll dress with ribbons, she immediately becomes Elvis’ focus. He’s surprised she’s that young—he was hoping she was 16 or 17, not 14—but he’s undeterred.

He begins courting her—in almost a teen dream fantasy of what it might be like to date a rock star. He’s kind, gentlemanly, filled with gifts and compliments. He confides in her—telling her how much he misses his mother, who has recently died, and how much she reminds him of home.

Notably, he doesn’t have sex with her. And it becomes clear this is not because he’s waiting for her to turn 18, but because he suffers from what we used to call the “Madonna/whore complex.” Starlets, groupies, et al, are for sex (he cheats on Priscilla many times throughout their relationship). But Priscilla, whom he calls “Little One” and treats like some sort of precious Fabergé egg, is too pure for such things.

Once Priscilla is flown off the base and sent to live at Graceland permanently—she spends her senior year of high school at a Catholic school in Memphis where she’s gawked at and gossiped about—Elvis’ infantilizing of her becomes more frustrating.

For one, she wants to have sex. She has desires. But her desires are of no interest to Elvis. He begins to control every aspect of her life—what she wears, how she applies her makeup, the color of her hair (he likes black). And, once they get married and have Lisa Marie, we begin to see her chafe a bit under his authority. But whenever she complains, he threatens to exile her from Graceland—and his life. His temper comes out—he never strikes her, per se, but he becomes violent during a pillow fight when Priscilla shows a bit of gumption. He wants her to be demure, not aggressive.

Despite all the clothes, cars, and jewels a girl could ask for, Graceland becomes a kind of gilded prison for Priscilla. And life with Elvis becomes less a fantasy and more a nightmare.

Elvis doesn’t come across as a monster in this film—we sense his own arrested development, that he, too, was cast into a world of fame too soon, that he was permanently unmoored by his mother’s death. But this is not the hagiography of Baz Luhrmann’s recent biopic. Notably, we never see Elvis perform (except for a brief tinkling on the piano at a party and once, from behind, on stage as he wiggles his ass to the disco version of “Thus Spake Zarathustra”). This is officially because Coppola could not secure the rights to Elvis’ music, but it works for the film, which is laser focused on Priscilla’s journey, not his.

Elvis, too, seems to be searching for meaning—we see him reading Buddhist books and taking psychedelic drugs, trying to find purpose in his own journey. But he’s simply too much the product of the patriarchy to view Priscilla as anything other than his personal property, or to reflect even slightly on what she’s going through.

And while Elordi doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting that was required of Austin Butler—who sang and danced and packed on the pounds to play Vegas Elvis—he makes an excellent Elvis Presley, particularly as he goes from dreamy gentleman caller to cruelly indifferent spouse. I was concerned that his height (he’s 6’5”!) would be distracting, but it works here—underscoring the contrast between man and girl; between power and vulnerability. And Spaeny, who won Best Actress for this role at the Venice Film Festival, is a real find as Priscilla, drawing us into her fears and aspirations. She’s in almost every minute of the film and she holds our attention easily, conveying her feelings with the slightest flash of her eyes or jut of her chin.

The muted Priscilla is so different from Luhrmann’s Elvis, in terms of tone, tempo, and palate, it almost seems like a rebuttal. But this is what Coppola does. She luxuriates in the details of a “girly” exterior—pink shag rugs, ornate jewelry boxes, false eyelashes, wardrobes of glamorous clothing—but equally demands that we look beyond those things.

Again and again, her films proclaim: There is so much more to this woman than meets the eye. Do not be distracted by the shiny baubles—something far more interesting happening here.

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Sigh.

And so we have Divergent, aka, The Hunger Games but with less fun wigs.

In
this film’s version of the future, Chicago is the only city to have
survived the apocalypse. (Totally believable. If they can survive their
own winters, a little nuclear winter should be a snap.)

The whole
population has been divided into factions—and it’s a bit like high
school. There’s Erudite (the brains), Candor (the school narcs),
Dauntless (the jocks), Amity (the hippie tree-huggers), and Abnegation
(the student government). Basically, it’s The Breakfast Club
goes dystopian. Our heroine, Tris (Shailene Woodley) is a member of
Abnegation and, as well as being the governing faction, they’re known
for their lack of vanity and selflessness.

Anyway, when a child
turns 16 in this universe, they attend the Reaping—er, Choosing Day
ceremony—where they get to pick which faction they want to belong to.
First, there’s a test to determine your natural place. You can choose
against your biology but it’s not recommended.

When Tris takes her
test, the tester (Maggie Q) freaks out and tells her to sneak out the
back and run for her life, rarely a good sign.

Turns out she’s a
“divergent”—or what we might’ve called a “floater” back in high
school—she doesn’t fit into any one group. This makes her a threat to
the ruling overlords, headed by Kate Winslet, in important hair.

So Tris has to hide her true identity, kind of pesky in a world where they have the technology to see inside your head.

Instead
of taking the safe route and sticking with Abnegation, she joins the
cool kids of Dauntless. Her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort, who will play
Woodley’s lover in the The Fault in Our Stars—awkward!) joins
Erudite. Something tells me this ends up being a bigger deal in future
books, as Erudite is conspiring with Winslet’s Jeanine to take over the
government.

In Dauntless, Tris meets Four (Theo James), the
studly, but unapproachable trainer of the new recruits, who begins to
take a keen interest in her. But why?

A lot of Divergent
plays like a sci-fi basic training film, with Tris having to overcome a
series of tests of endurance and bravery. But one of the cool elements
of the plot: She needs to try to think like a Dauntless—i.e., using
tools and strength—not like a “Divergent”—who might use a combination of
all traits, plus an almost extrasensory intuition. I dig it.

That
being said, there are a few problems: The film is almost two and a half
hours long, and seems poorly paced. The beginning has a leisurely
tempo—the final third, which contains much of the pivotal action, feels
rushed. Also, the film doesn’t have the wit or eye popping flair of The Hunger Games.

As
for Woodley? It’s unfair to compare her to the talent-and-charm bomb
that is Jennifer Lawrence, but she’s darn good. She has an alertness
about her, an intelligence in her eyes—she draws you in. And Theo
James—previously famed for taking Lady Mary’s virginity (and
inconveniently dropping dead) on Downton Abbey—proves to be an appropriately studly and appealing male lead.

I’m
looking forward to the next installment. Will the districts finally
overtake the capitol and will Katniss prevail? Sorry. I swear I’ll get
this straight eventually.

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It’s funny because, since
the glory days of Stallone, Willis, and Schwarzenegger, the movies been
searching for the new go-to action hero. Various young men have been
trotted out—Ryan Reynolds, Chris Pine, Chris Evans—none quite sticking.
So Neeson’s success is a bit like a Viagra ad: You want something done,
ask an old guy to do it.

And why not? Liam Neeson is a commanding
physical presence, with a deep voice, and—helpful!—actual acting chops. I
still prefer the “sensitive Liam” of Husbands and Wives and Love Actually, but that’s just a personal preference.

In Non-Stop—which I have also dubbed Lady Mary on a Plane—
Neeson plays a variation on his new persona—basically a badass who is
also a good guy. Here, he’s Air Marshal Bill Marks who’s on a flight to
Norway when he receives an anonymous text message: Put $130 million into
a bank account or one person on the plane will die every 20 minutes.
(Although there’s a lot of text messaging in this film—and even a few
autofills!—there are no hilarious autocorrect snafus, a la “One person
on this plane will diet every 20 minutes”—alas).

Marks
has to figure out who the texts are coming from and try to stop them.
Then there’s a minor twist: That account number the bad guy left? It’s
in Marks’ name. Ground control thinks he’s the hijacker. The pilot and
co-pilot and various flight attendants—including yes, Michelle Dockery
(aka Lady Mary) and Lupita Nyong’o (pre-12 Years a Slave fame
so mostly as eye candy here)—aren’t sure. Everyone’s a suspect,
including Julianne Moore as an overly game, slightly tipsy passenger who
takes a shining to Marks and Corey Stoll (of House of Cards) as a bellicose New York cop on the flight.

I
absolutely loved the ingenious way the first passenger died (of course,
I won’t give it away here) and the film kept me guessing all the way
through. Unfortunately, when the big reveal comes it’s so far-fetched,
you’d have to suspend your belief way past cruising altitude to buy it.

Airplane movies are a risky proposition because you’re trapped in the sky with no escape. In the case of Non-Stop, that’s mostly a good thing.

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