After a few weeks spent recharging my battery in the wake of covering SXSW 2024, I’m locked and loaded for the 18th annual Dallas International Film Festival (DIFF), which will be held April 25-May 2 at several theaters around town. DIFF 2024 will feature screenings of over 100 titles, many of which will be world premieres. The festival will also be host to a panel discussion about the future of cinematic exhibition and dozens of opportunities to hear filmmakers speak about their movies at post-screening Q&As.
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A fitting subtitle for director Lance Oppenheim’s Spermworld would be Dispatches from the End of the World. That’s less to do with anyone we meet in the documentary and more an indictment of the entire system. The film explores the unregulated wild west of online sperm donation mainly from the perspective of a few of the men offering up their genetic material.
Their clients are people who want to become parents but who, for myriad reasons, can’t go about it either in the conventional way or even by using established medical options like sperm banks or IVF. The latter options, as you might have guessed, since everything in our society revolves around money, are often prohibitively expensive.
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The magic contained within the rich history of the found footage subgenre, which includes 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, the Paranormal Activity series, as well as the runaway hit The Blair Witch Project, depends on the filmmakers presenting something that might have actually happened. That’s harder to do when you look up at the screen and immediately think, “Hey, it’s Polka-Dot Man from The Suicide Squad!”
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I stood in the dining room of Melody, the gracious host for my SXSW 2024 adventure. She had asked me the day before how the fest was going. I had issued a boilerplate response about how it was tiring, as fests always are, but that I was having a good time. Later I realized that she was probably asking about the quality of the fest; how good were this year’s crop of movies?
As we chatted the next day, I admitted that the movies I had seen this year weren’t quite as good as what I had seen at last year’s South By. Upon further reflection, I don’t think that sentiment is entirely the fault of the movies or the SXSW programmers. There were a few other factors at play that made me feel this way.
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If you’re reading this within the first few hours of its publication, that means I’m making final preparations for my coverage of South By Southwest 2024 in Austin, TX! I’m partnering with an outside website this year, which means you’ll have to do some clicking for my reactions to what I’m watching at this year’s fest. The good folks at The Cosmic Circus are sponsoring my press credentials, so anything I write will be posted there.
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The key sequence in the procedural courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall is indicative of director Justine Triet’s masterful storytelling for what it doesn’t show us. The man who suffers the fatal titular fall, Samuel, made a surreptitious audio recording of a vicious argument between he and his wife, Sandra, that ultimately turns physically violent.
As the jury hears this altercation, Triet allows us to see what they can’t. She stages the heated exchange as a flashback, but only the portion where words are used as weapons. Before the first slap is doled out, Triet cuts back to the courtroom. We experience the physical violence between Samuel and Sandra as the jury does, who can only hear the wordless scuffle with no way of knowing who is doing what to whom.
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I’m not sure if the title of the new film from Bradley Cooper, Maestro, is supposed to refer to the movie’s subject, legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, or to Cooper himself. Because make no mistake, Bradley Cooper is the definitive maestro in control here, and he wants you to know it; as with A Star is Born, Cooper’s debut behind the camera, the actor-turned-director is pulling double duty as both director and star. The results this time around are a decidedly more mixed bag.
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Director Alexander Payne’s emotionally rich, quietly moving triumph The Holdovers is a study in the old cliché “before judging someone, walk a mile in their shoes.” Payne harnesses the empathetic powers of the movies – an artform the late, great Roger Ebert once called “an empathy machine” – to deliver a complex and heartfelt character study of three souls each struggling with their own demons and who find a brief solace in each other from the myriad cruelties of the outside world.
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“I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.”
These words are spoken in The Zone of Interest – director Jonathan Glazer’s utterly transfixing and horrifying film about the Holocaust – over a breakfast table as the woman who utters them eats her morning eggs.
If you didn’t know the actual words used and were asked to guess at what was being said using her tone, the surroundings, and the action, you might say that this woman was reminding the young lady serving the meal that the salt and pepper shakers need to be brought to the table, or that the coffee isn’t quite up to par this morning. She seems a little put out, but delivers the very real threat of murder like she’s annoyed that the napkins are folded incorrectly.
Here lies the sickening magic at the heart of Glazer’s nauseatingly potent picture. We don’t witness a single act of violence over the course of The Zone of Interest’s 104 minutes, yet it succeeds as a deeply disturbing portrait of what political theorist, historian, and philosopher Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil.”
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We’re not even a month into 2024, and I already have a contender for most bonkers movie of the year. Coming from Norway, The Bitcoin Car is a tragicomic musical about a small village that begins to experience troubling phenomena when a brand-new bitcoin mining facility starts operations. This movie has it all: an irrepressibly upbeat song about how death unites us all, singing electrons, an anti-capitalist worldview, and a goat named Chlamydia.
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The world might be falling apart by almost any metric you can imagine, but one thing (maybe the only thing?) that gave me solace this year was the amazing slate of films that 2023 provided. To my mind, 2023 was the best year in cinema since 2007, another banner movie year with an incredibly rich set of releases.
As you’ll see, 2023 offered up a similarly seemingly bottomless well of great cinema.
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Never underestimate the power of saying something old in a fresh, new way. With his feature film debut American Fiction, writer and director Cord Jefferson is standing on the shoulders of giants – namely Robert Townsend and Spike Lee’s – with his biting satire about what kinds of Black stories interest white audiences. And while the satire might be razor sharp, Jefferson simultaneously offers up a slice-of-life story about a man coming to terms with his imperfect family, how they’ve shaped him into an imperfect person, and how he’s helped with that project himself.
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Based on a 1992 novel by surrealist Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, Lanthimos infuses his wacked-out aesthetic into this modern, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by way of Hal Ashby’s Being There. Sitting through Poor Things is an incendiary, hypnotic experience. The film’s subject matter is about nothing less than the human compulsion for self-improvement.
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I’m publishing my first ever review round-up of recent releases. This is a chance for me to get on the record concerning titles that I’m excited to wrestle with, but in short-form capsule reviews, so I can cover as many as possible. To make a long story short (too late!), here are some brief thoughts on four winter 2023 releases.
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Two years ago – before confirming it, I would have sworn it was at least four – I wrote in this space about attending an incredible re-creation of an important day in US history that has a significant tie to cinema. Each year on November 22, the operators of the Texas Theatre run the original program that was scheduled on the day that Lee Harvey Oswald walked into the theater, without buying a ticket, and was arrested less than an hour later as the man who had assassinated John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States.
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A few months ago, I wrote in this space about a brand-new film festival debuting at the city-owned Plaza Theatre in Garland, Texas. I published the article enough in advance of the first (but hopefully far from last) annual It Came from Texas Film Festival so that any readers who were interested could snag festival passes at the early-bird, discounted rate.
I enjoyed attending the fest so much – I made all but two of the eleven feature presentations; one because I had already screened it in preparation for my piece in September, the other because it started at eleven P.M. and I am very old and tired – that I wanted to provide an overview of the experience.
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How many masterpieces can one person produce? We may never know, but iconic filmmaker – and elder statesman of cinema – Martin Scorsese seems determined to find out before he’s finished behind the camera. After the likes of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, and at least five other pictures that deserve consideration as masterpieces, Scorsese has done it again.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a sprawling, ambitious, deeply moving mashup of the director’s beloved gangster genre and his first Western, which wrestles with American sins that a not-insignificant portion of our population would like to bury and ignore forever.
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Legendary experimental documentary filmmaker Godfrey Reggio’s newest project helped me understand what frustrated me so much about the 2021 film Don’t Look Up. That’s director Adam McKay’s cri de coeur polemic about our rapid destruction of the planet and our steadfast complacency to do anything about it, including even recognizing that there’s a problem. In my review for Don’t Look Up, I primarily focused on McKay’s ineffective smugness as a tool for chastising the general public for refusing to take the threat of climate change seriously. (In the film, a meteor’s impending collision with earth is used as a metaphor for climate change.)
While watching Reggio’s latest picture, Once Within a Time – the documentarian shares a co-directing credit with Jon Kane, who served as editor on Reggio’s Naqoyqatsi and Visitors – similar feelings surfaced to the ones I had while watching Don’t Look Up. Once Within a Time doesn’t have a smugness problem. Reggio’s film is playful, at times impenetrable, and evinces a bemused perplexity at the current human condition more than any need to arrogantly lecture. My frustration with the film – and, what I belatedly realized was my frustration with Don’t Look Up – is the missed opportunity of targeting the actual culprits that have caused our current situation.
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Blonde Death is a stunning piece of outsider art/trash cinema. Made in 1984 by first (and only) time director James Robert Baker – aka James Dillinger – the shot-on-VHS movie is Badlands by way of a soap opera. Baker was a member of an early- ‘80s L.A. art collective called EZTV, and he was a prolific author of, as Wikipedia describes it, “sharply satirical, predominantly gay-themed transgressional fiction.” Shot with a budget of $2000 of his own money, Blonde Death has an air of Tennessee Williams about it, albeit unapologetically queer and gloriously transgressive.
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As I type this, I’m getting ready to reserve my tickets for day three of the fest before making the short trek to the theater for day two’s first screening. On the docket for today is my first documentary, Scala!!!, a Fantastic Fest original found footage festival, two more 2023 releases, The Origin and What You Wish For, and I’ll wrap things up at midnight with a 1984 repertory screening of Blonde Death.
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