Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about the perils of being a movie critic: Namely, holding opinions that run contrary to the popular taste. While he’s a big fan of 1976’s Murder by Death (directed by Robert Moore from a script by Neil Simon and starring Eileen Brennan, James Coco, Peter Falk, Alec Guinness, Elsa Lanchester, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith, Nancy Walker, Estelle Winwood, and Truman Capote), critics remain largely dismissive of what they regard as cornball material — even though a case can be made that there are different levels of cornball, and Murder by Death can rightly be regarded as High Cornball. Conversely, Schulz thought Jonathan Demme 1993 legal drama Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks as a gay lawyer fighting his unfair dismissal from a corporate firm, all while he’s dying of AIDS, to be “so condescending and so phony from Moment One.” Likewise, there are a couple Alexander Payne-directed films that rub him the wrong way: The 2011 tragicomedy The Descendants with George Clooney weathering a set of life circumstances (vegetative wife, disputatious children) in Kauai, and the 2002 dramedy About Schmidt, with Jack Nicholson as an insurance actuary facing retirement and an uncertain senescence. Three films that Schulz hated, but were loved universally by critics and patronized roundly by audiences (The Descendants earning $177.2 million against its $20 million budget and About Schmidt $105.8 million against $30 million). There are lines in the sand that individual critics inevitably draw for themselves, and Schulz has his own grooves on the beach. Now, this past week was deemed by Levora as unusual, inasmuch as Schulz stayed out of the multiplexes and reviewed films that were released on Netflix. Instead of paying $20 to see Taylor Swift performing her hits from her Eras Tour film, he instead saw Wes Anderson’s short-form adaptations of four Roald Dahl stories: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison. Running forty minutes total, they are magical tales that grow progressively darker because that’s where Dahl’s imagination invariably went — the dark places. One could say that the films compose a portrait of the author himself, as there are aspects found within these tales (misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism) that could have fairly been applied to Dahl the man — and don’t think that Anderson didn’t intend for that to be so! Levora calls this quandary “separating the artist from the art: It’s impossible unless it isn’t.” In spite of the sort of moral ambiguity that typically sends audiences shrieking away in fright, Schulz thought Anderson’s work should have been released in the theaters, such was the quality of his adaptations. Schulz puts these shorts above Asteroid City, Anderson’s film from earlier in the year — and Schulz loved him his Asteroid City! He wasn’t so thrilled about Chloe Domont’s erotic psych-thriller Fair Play, starring Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich, Eddie Marsan, and Rich Sommer, which he says started well but wound up in that ennui-filled area of space best summarized as “meh.” Imagine, if you would, watching Basic Instinct back in 1992 and walking out saying, “Meh.” That sounds like Fair Play: Fantastic set-up and an iron-clad premise; but rather than ratcheting up the suspense in novel ways, it settles on predictable developments and shouty dialogue. Still, if you have Netflix, Schulz says there are worse fare to give over 113 minutes of your life. Concerning Maggie Betts’s The Burial, which stars Jamie Foxx, Tommy Lee Jones, Jurnee Smollett, Pamela Reed, Mamoudou Athie, Alan Ruck, and Bill Camp, and can be accessed on Amazon Prime, Schulz says it’s the type of film that people of a certain age will say, “They don’t make them like this anymore” — meaning, here, a straightforward courtroom drama that one used to see in the Eighties (and the early Nineties). It’s based on a 1999 New Yorker article by Jonathan Harr about the lawsuit brought by Jeremiah Joseph O’Keefe (Jones) against the Loewen funeral company. After O’Keefe’s own conglomerate of funeral homes was squeezed out of competition by Loewen, O’Keefe hired Willie E Gary (Foxx) to represent him in his suit. And represent is what Foxx does! The film can be pretty formulaic in its courtroom tropes (a common fault of such movies from back in the day), but Betts made the wise decision to have Foxx play Gary, as this kind of drama allows him the kind of stage for him to really have fun with the role. Still, Foxx aside, Schulz wonders if he would have enjoyed The Burial as much had he shelled out his shekels at his local Cineplex — a question he (and, no doubt, many other people) are asking themselves more and more these days. Since these streaming services don’t offer previews, there weren’t any to offer this time around. That said, we do have Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming, long-awaited Killers of the Flower Moon, as well as the thirtieth anniversary of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. All is not bleak, friend-os. Hang in there. . .

Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl Shorts, “Fair Play,” and “The Burial”