Justin Chang

Blanc believes that Judd is innocent and enlists him to help solve the murder, which won't be easy.

Wicks is the victim of what is known in detective fiction as an impossible crime, one that seems to defy rational explanation.

At one point, Blanc gives Judd and the audience a crash course in the work of John Dixon Carr, the undisputed master of the impossible crime novel.

Since Carr is another of my favorite writers, Johnson's next-level genre geekery almost had me levitating out of my seat.

Wake Up Deadman may not be the best movie I've seen this year, but in some ways, and I don't often say this kind of thing, it feels like the movie that was made most for me.

That goes for its ideas as well as its genre trappings.

Just as the first two Knives Out movies skewered racism, classism, billionaires, and tech bros, Wake Up Deadman takes sharp aim at what it sees as the intolerance and insularity of the Christian right.

The political jabs aren't always subtle, and sometimes the petty, ill-tempered parishioners sound too alike in their strident bickering.

But that just makes Father Judd all the more appealing a character, as he sets out to humbly yet radically love his community.

Given how good O'Connor has been lately, in movies like Challengers and The Mastermind, it's saying a lot that this is one of his best performances, and one that elevates this snarky, satirical murder farce to a genuinely contemplative plane.

Even as tensions mount, there's more than one victim, and possibly more than one killer.

The movie becomes a kind of theological debate, pitting Judd the earnest believer against Blanc the fierce skeptic.

Who emerges the winner?

Let's just say that with a puzzle as satisfyingly constructed as Wake Up Deadman, God really is in the details.

Anyone will tell you that these are tumultuous, borderline apocalyptic times for the film industry.

Box office is down.

The threat of AI looms.

Billionaires and tech giants are laying waste to what remains of the major Hollywood studios.

I'm not entirely sure how to square all this bad news with my own good news, which is that I saw more terrific new movies this year than I have any year since before the pandemic.

True, most of those movies weren't from here, but all of them played in U.S.