There is one scene in Selah and the Spades that gets to the root of writer/director Tayarisha Poe’s tale of control and the damage caused by an insatiable thirst for power. It comes late in the film, and it’s between the titular high school senior Selah and her young protégé, Paloma. It’s a test of loyalty. Selah’s unrivaled power as the head of the Spades is in question. The Spades is the most powerful of the five factions – think the five families in The Godfather – serving up every vice you could think of to the students of a well-to-do Pennsylvania boarding school.
Selah asks Paloma to prove her fealty. The scene perfectly captures – in no small part thanks to the performance of Lovie Simone, who plays Selah – just how drunk our hero is on her own power. We see Paloma in the next scene, walking in a daze with bloody knuckles. She has done what Selah asked. She has, in this moment, anyway, passed the test.
If only the rest of Selah and the Spades was as focused and compelling as that one scene.
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Atlantics is a ghost story that weaves themes like economic inequality and crushing poverty into its romantic drama plot. That may seem overwhelming, but it never is in the hands of writer and director Mati Diop. This is Diop’s feature film directorial debut, and the incredible atmospheric tone of her picture, mixed with the rich subject matter, make Atlantics an indelible storytelling experience. Diop now holds the distinction as the first black woman ever to direct a film included in competition at the Cannes film festival. That’s no doubt a consequence of the festival’s past organizers overlooking many other deserving filmmakers, but Diop is a hell of an artist. Her movie is a great achievement; one that earned this bit of filmmaking history.
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The theater closures and new release postponements caused by the coronavirus pandemic have affected my review release schedule. Because the local release of the movie I was going to write about this week has been indefinitely pushed back, I’ve been asked to hold onto my review of it until it opens here in Dallas. So, I’ve decided to take a look at the next film in my ongoing 100 Essential Films series. If you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here.
Film number eight is the second in a trio of films from 1939, a banner year for movies. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the second entry in the series from director Frank Capra (the first was It Happened One Night).
This one was a first viewing for me. While I didn’t respond to it quite as positively as I would have guessed based on its reputation, I did admire the cast, Capra’s direction, and some of the plot elements. Like every other film in the series so far, I borrowed a Blu-ray through intra-library loan (thankfully I got it before our library shut down due to a city ordinance to combat coronavirus).
I suspect this might be the first movie to showcase the proverbial “smoke-filled back room,” where political deals are hashed out among power brokers. I’m not sure, though. I haven’t had much time to do research, as I’m focusing on my social distancing. Stay safe out there!
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It would be hard to overstate the rapturous reaction I had to Portrait of a Lady on Fire. There is an overwhelming beauty to every aspect of the picture. From the cinematography, shot composition, and acting, to the delicate lyricism with which writer/director Céline Sciamma tells her story, this is an exquisite work of art.
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The new film from directing team the Safdie brothers is a kinetic roller coaster ride of a movie. It imparts the exhilarating highs and soul-crushing lows of its main character, the inveterate gambler (who is also a conman in his own right) Howard Ratner. Adam Sandler, in a role he was born to play, gives Howard – and the movie – an unseemly, queasy propulsiveness. He’s aided in this by the Safdie brothers’ singular directing style and their breakneck-paced screenplay – which they wrote with long-time collaborator Ronald Bronstein.
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The 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women has won box office success plus plenty of critical acclaim and awards season honors, including Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Actress and Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Score, and Costume Design. But among all those Academy Awards honors, it’s the one notable snub that stands out. Missing from the list is a nomination for Greta Gerwig’s direction. This omission particularly stings because – in addition to the long history of female directors being overlooked in the category – it’s Ms. Gerwig’s superb directing work that stands out among all the other excellent elements of the film.
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James Mangold’s very manly and patriotic sportscar racing movie Ford v Ferrari is about as slick as big Hollywood blockbusters come. The director with credits as varied as 2001’s Kate & Leopold, the 2007 remake of the classic western 3:10 to Yuma, and not one, but two comic book franchise films about the X-Men’s Wolverine character has turned his craftsperson’s talents to the sports biopic. Ford v Ferrari feels like a movie we might have gotten 20, maybe even 30 years ago. And I mean that in a good, throwback sort of way.
The script – originally penned by Jason Keller and rewritten by screenwriting brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth – features, if memory serves, exactly one female speaking part. At one point, that character is reduced to sitting in a lawn chair as she watches our two manly-men heroes resolve their differences with an old-fashioned American fist fight. The rah-rah patriotism of the picture – which only ever flirts with outright jingoism – brings to mind something like Top Gun, but with race cars instead of fighter jets.
All that aside, Ford v Ferrari is also a damn good time at the movies. It’s a crowd-pleaser that offers unadulterated movie spectacle.
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The centerpiece of director Noah Baumbach’s searing Marriage Story is the kind of scene you might guess would be at the heart of any movie about a disintegrating marriage. It’s a fight. Husband Charlie and wife Nicole are in the bowels of the painful negotiations involving who gets what in the divorce, the most important of which is custody of their young son, Henry. The fight takes place in Charlie’s newly leased apartment; the apartment is a way to show the court that the New York theatre director is serious about being close to his son, who is staying with Nicole in Los Angeles.
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As with the work of Barry Jenkins (Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk) and Sean Baker (The Florida Project), director Trey Edward Shults has crafted one of the most touching, humanist films of its release year. Waves is a moving, tender, horrifying, human drama that showcases both the best and worst inclinations of our species. And, like the work of Terrence Malick, a mentor of Shults – he served in various capacities on three of Malick’s films – Waves has a lyrical poetry to it that elevates the picture above your average family drama (or melodrama). Shults’ sensibilities combine with a knock-out ensemble cast and an unsettling score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to make Waves one of the best films of the year.
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You don’t just watch Sátántangó, Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s 7.5-hour paean to slow cinema. It seeps into your bones. At least, it seeped into mine.
Up until now, the movie was notoriously difficult to see. A flawless new 4K scan of the film, and imminent release on Blu-ray, will change that. Prior to 2019, the only home video release of the art film was a 2006 DVD by the Chicago non-profit cinema arts organization, Facets, which (I’ve been told) wasn’t the best transfer, and has now become all but impossible to find. So, with a beautiful transfer of it readily available, I suppose the only bragging rights left among cinephiles will be seeing all seven-and-a-half hours in one sitting in a theatrical setting.
I had the opportunity to do just that at Dallas’s historic Texas Theater, and the experience was exhilarating, transcendent, anger-inducing, exhausting, and ultimately very rewarding.
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Both Paul and Gilligan do justice to the character and to Breaking Bad with El Camino. My only gripe with the film is that it doesn’t look particularly cinematic (which really stood out since I saw it in a theatrical exhibition setting). It looks – and mostly plays – like an extended episode of Breaking Bad, but when you’re talking about one of the best shows ever created, that’s hardly a complaint.
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At very specific moments throughout The Nightingale, director Jennifer Kent has her characters look directly into the camera. Her main character, Clare, does so both as she’s singing a song to entertain English troops posted in the Australian outback and as the commanding officer of those troops is brutalizing her. Kent even manages to catch a shot of an infant – within the movie, it’s Clare’s baby – looking into the camera as the little one falls asleep.
These moments set Kent’s film apart. They implicate every member of the audience in the horrific violence happening on screen. They also tie the oppressed and dehumanized characters to Kent herself. We’ve seen this kind of story many times before, but almost never from a female perspective. Kent’s vision is a shattering one.
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I’m doing something a little different with this week’s review. As I explain below, I have recently fallen down the rabbit hole of Twin Peaks, so I took advantage of re-watching the feature film Fire Walk with Me as a chance to add to my Revisited feature. That’s where I’m going on the record with a movie I’ve seen before but never written about. I’m also mixing in a funny story about the first time I watched the movie with my partner Rachel.
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Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (OUaTiH) is Tarantino’s re-creation of and loving, yet gleefully revisionist, tribute to this fractious period in Hollywood’s history. Without giving too much away, this film is a spiritual cousin to Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. That movie incensed more than a few people with its shockingly gory climax that reimagined the end of World War II.
The same will probably be true for OUaTiH. Tarantino puts his unique spin on the bloody, unspeakable events that closed the 1960s. When creating works of art, I have no need for the artist to feel constrained by the facts when representing real events. A big part of art is reimagining the world in new, different, and interesting ways. A possible exception is documentaries, but even those have exceptions to the rule. Mainly, the purpose Tarantino’s divergence from truth serves in OUaTiH, at least for me, was one of catharsis. Just like in Inglourious Basterds, we get to see good triumph over evil, in the bloodiest, most outrageous way possible…
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It feels like an incredibly trite observation to make that the story director LuLu Wang is telling in her film The Farewell is universal despite being centered around a Chinese family. It’s one of those go-to descriptors us white people love to pull out when we enjoy a story that doesn’t revolve around people who look like us. As if we have to be the ones to swoop in and proclaim something worthy because we were able to connect with an entire cast of non-whites for 90+ continuous minutes. We’re so used to whiteness being centered in virtually all popular entertainment that it feels like the biggest triumph – something on a UNIVERSAL scale – when that isn’t the case.
The Farewell isn’t universal despite featuring an exclusively Chinese cast. The Farewell is universal because it tells a very moving story that is steeped in the messiness of human emotion and relationships.
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Yesterday set itself a pretty low entertainment bar to clear with its premise. “You mean I’ll get to sit and listen to Beatles tunes for two hours? Yeah, where do I sign?” Screenwriter Richard Curtis – he of Love Actually fame – and director Danny Boyle have crafted a movie that feels slight, yes, but one that is also infectiously charming and just a plain damn good time at the movies. It might not contain the deep and meaningful qualities with which we’ve all imbued the music at its center, but it brought a big, fat smile to my face while I was watching it. On this occasion, and in these bleak times, that was more than enough.
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There’s a scene toward the end of the comedy Late Night in which Emma Thompson’s character, the hard-driving talk show host Katherine Newbury, climbs multiple flights of stairs in a Brooklyn walk-up in order to have a heart to heart with Molly, her newest writer. Out of nowhere – or perhaps out of the early 2000s – a cheery, vaguely inspirational pop song comes on the soundtrack as Katherine huffs and puffs up those stairs, stopping at one point to take off her shoes in order to aid her ascent. It’s one of a few cliché moments (also included is an obligatory montage, showing hard work resulting in success) that stand out for all the wrong reasons in what is otherwise a smart, funny, and fresh take on both feminism and cultural diversity in the work place.
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I was resistant at first to the The Last Black Man in San Francisco. I couldn’t make sense of the movie’s tone. It seemed funny and serious, elegiac and silly; a study in contradictions. It is all those things and more. Once I gave myself over to it, when I fell into sync with its wavelength, it blossomed before me into the most moving, unforgettable experience I’ve had at the movies so far this year. Director Joe Talbot and his childhood friend, creative collaborator, and star Jimmie Fails have made a singular work of art here.
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I had to watch the opening sequence of Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell twice to make sure I hadn’t imagined that the first 30-odd minutes are one long, uninterrupted take. I ended up watching the whole movie twice; that’s how easily it sucks you into its world. Turns out, I had imagined that one unbroken take. My mistaken impression about the opening is a testament to Perry’s serpentine camera movements and the brilliantly controlled chaos of the scene. I was even more surprised when I learned Perry didn’t shoot Her Smell digitally. He shot it on 35mm film, which would have made a sustained shot like the one I invented in my head that much more difficult.
My faulty memory aside, the real take away is that Perry – as well as his star and co-producer, Elisabeth Moss – has displayed virtuoso talent with this ambitious picture.
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Chilean director Sebastián Lelio has pulled a Michael Haneke with his latest film, Gloria Bell. In 2007, Haneke, an Austrian filmmaker, made an English-language version of his 1997 movie Funny Games that was a shot for shot remake. Lelio is calling Gloria Bell a “reimagining” of his own 2013 hit Chilean-set movie, called Gloria. I’ve seen both versions, and while they aren’t as exactingly identical as Haneke’s films apparently are (I’ve only seen the 2007 version of Funny Games), it’s pretty damn close. A few lines of dialog have been changed, one minor character is swapped out for another, and obviously the actors have their own unique take on the material, but otherwise the two movies are strikingly similar. Where Haneke used both versions of Funny Games as a sadistic (arguably hypocritical) critique of mindless violence in the media, Lelio’s films are a warm, ultimately soaring character study of one woman.
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