“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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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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With Oppenheimer, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has made nothing less than the Lawrence of Arabia of the 21st century. Like David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece, Nolan’s picture is epic and grand in both scope and scale, while delicately humanizing a figure about whom most of the populace – myself included, at least, until I saw the movie – know little-to-nothing.
While the grandeur of recreating the first human-made atomic reaction has transfixed media coverage and those anticipating the film’s release, Oppenheimer’s true triumph is in unlocking the mystery of the man. By the time we reach its conclusion, Nolan’s film has given us a crystal-clear understanding of who J. Robert Oppenheimer was. We understand what drove him to unleash an unimaginable weapon upon mankind and how that work tortured him for the rest of his life.
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Damien Chazelle had a dream to fuse Singin’ in the Rain and Eyes Wide Shut, and, for our sins, that’s what he’s given us.
In preparation for this review, I came across a description of Babylon as drawing on “just enough real film history to flatter cinephiles and to risk their ire.” I couldn’t have put it any better myself.
Chazelle’s epic three-hour+ ode to the birth of Hollywood as a cultural phenomenon – holding sway now for a century – is by turns brilliant, exuberant, self-indulgent, exhausting, and ultimately flattens out the history of the artform Chazelle clearly cherishes. The writer/director is also so focused on giving us the spectacle and bacchanal of the last days of silent film that he forgot to write characters or a story.
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As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but notice the similarity in names between Prince Amleth, the hero of The Northman, and a certain other famous prince in world literature, namely Hamlet. As the story began to unfold in the new film from director Robert Eggers, who brought us the deeply researched and meticulously crafted films The Witch and The Lighthouse, I saw other similarities. There is a king who is betrayed and slain by his own brother. The young prince, his mother taken as a spoil of victory by the new king, vows revenge on his treacherous uncle.
I thought that Eggers and his cowriter, the Icelandic poet, novelist, and lyricist who goes by Sjón, might have taken inspiration from the Bard for their tale of Nordic kings and Viking berserkers. Turns out – as I’m sure more than a few of you already knew – that I had it backwards. It was Shakespeare who took inspiration from young Amleth for his own Prince of Denmark. As I should have suspected after seeing his first two films, Eggers took inspiration for his movie from and adapted the 13th century version of the Nordic legend of Amleth as memorialized by Saxo Grammaticus, in his Gesta Danorum.
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As with his 2016 film, Jackie, director Pablo Larraín has crafted another emotionally charged fable centered around a powerful woman and the impossible circumstances in which she finds herself. I use the word fable to describe Spencer because that’s how the movie describes itself in its opening seconds. “A fable from a true tragedy,” are the words we see as the movie begins. It’s a clever way for Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight to immunize themselves from charges of historical inaccuracy.
The word fable also readies Spencer’s audience for something fantastical. Larraín has made a biopic by way of psychological horror here; his picture attains an emotional truth by tying its point of view to the heavily subjective mental and emotional state of its protagonist, Diana, Princess of Wales.
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The Green Knight is the most visually stunning picture of the year so far. Director David Lowery’s retelling of the famous Arthurian tale is a brilliant mix of fidelity to the original story and inspired tweaks by Lowery, who also wrote the screenplay. As with his 2017 film, A Ghost Story, Lowery showcases his well-honed ability to set an otherworldly mood and to take the viewer on an unexpected trip.
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It’s an exciting, confusing, and scary time to be a film lover. Director Steve McQueen has decided to hasten the blurring of the already very fuzzy line between cinema and television with his Small Axe anthology of films. He’s done it with the help of a global pandemic. McQueen began working on the idea for Small Axe as early as 2010, and he had the project in some form of development since 2012. Originally conceived as a more conventional television series for the BBC, McQueen realized that he had enough material to make five distinct, standalone movies.
When the premier of the first picture in the series, Mangrove, was cancelled because of the 2020 Cannes film festival shutdown in the spring, due to COVID, the director decided to try a hybrid approach to distribution. Small Axe would run on BBC One, as originally planned, but it was also featured in the fall at the virtually held 2020 New York Film Festival. The film community got a collective case of the vapors trying to decide how to classify Small Axe. Is it television? Is it cinema? After seeing Mangrove – and being highly anxious to visit the rest of the films in the series – I am coming down firmly in the camp of, “when the movie is this damn compelling and well-made, who the hell cares what you call it?”
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“Power just means a world where we’re safe to be ourselves.”
That’s a quote in the film One Night in Miami… from the character Muhammad Ali – more accurately, Cassius Clay, as the story takes place on the eve of the legendary boxer converting to Islam and changing his name. What power means to the Black community, and the best way to obtain it, is the preoccupation of both the film and the four iconic real-life figures at its center. The movie is all about power, both in the Black community and among these four characters, who would all shape the world in their own ways. It’s a gripping character study that addresses the ongoing struggle of the Black movement to secure that basic sense of safety that Ali is talking about.
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“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression.”
So says Herman J. Mankiewicz early in the biopic about his greatest professional achievement, writing the screenplay for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. In Mank, that’s precisely what director David Fincher does with Mankiewicz. Here was a man of principle, Fincher shows us. Here was a man of character. Here was a drunk, an inveterate gambler, but above all, here was a man with an absolute conviction in what he believed.
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Aaron Sorkin’s sophomore effort in the director’s chair – after 2017’s Molly’s Game – is just as compelling, erudite, and masterful as his first. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is one of the best movies of the year so far. All of Sorkin’s strengths are on display here. His screenplay is brimming with his signature style of crackling dialog. He examines with nuance and complexity mature themes like patriotic dissent, justice, and what makes American democracy function. His characters are all fully fleshed out people, not merely two-dimensional dialog delivery devices.
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Think of Kelly Reichardt’s new film First Cow as a spiritual cousin and companion piece to P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. The films are about the American dream on the western frontier in the early 1800s (Cow) and the early 1900s (Blood). There Will Be Blood is about the American dream run amok on greed and unchecked success; it’s the story of an oil tycoon told on an epic scale. First Cow focuses on, essentially, a small business owner who goes out of business before ever striking it rich – if you’ve seen the film, you’ll get the irony of my putting it that way. It’s a tale of American entrepreneurial spirit on the smallest, most personal scale.
That’s not to suggest there are no dramatic stakes (pun intended) in First Cow. The contemplative pace of Reichardt’s film and the languorous nature of her camerawork both belie the story’s dramatic tension.
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Film number nine in my 100 Essential Films Series (if you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here) has been staring me in the face for awhile now. The four-hour run time alone was a little daunting. But, with the current political, social, and cultural climate, I decided it was time to tackle Gone with the Wind. It’s the last movie in a trio of them from 1939, one of the greatest years in movie history. This was a first viewing for me, aside from feeling like I knew almost everything about it via cultural osmosis. I watched it through the streaming service Vudu, and the digital transfer looked gorgeous. Too bad the film’s actual content doesn’t match the visuals.
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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 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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The contemplative, roving camera of Terrence Malick has been loosed upon the breathtaking beauty of Europe. But the grandeur of the sweeping vistas, open fields, and European architecture comes at a price. Malick’s film A Hidden Life begins in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II and ends in 1943, well before the horrors of that conflict ended. We see little of the war’s devastation, though, because A Hidden Life focuses on historical figure Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian man who refused to fight in Hitler’s army. The picture is a meditation on the price of resistance, for both Franz and those closest to him. It also wrestles with religion and draws parallels between the fervor of the German and Austrian people for Hitler’s cause and America’s current political climate. A Hidden Life does all this in Malick’s inimitable, transcendent elliptical style.
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It started with a Fresnel lens. If you’re wondering what that is, then we have something in common; so did I when I first read the term. For his second feature effort, The Lighthouse, director Robert Eggers knew he wanted the 19th century technology – developed specifically to make lighthouses visible by ships from farther away than was previously possible – as the centerpiece of his film. Just like with his directorial debut, the hypnotic 2015 film The Witch, Eggers was obsessed, and achieved, the most meticulous period accuracy for The Lighthouse. It seems blasphemous to use the word masterpiece so early in his career, but with his painstaking attention to detail, his eye for striking cinematic imagery, and his exploration of the human psyche, that’s just what Eggers has produced with both The Witch and now with The Lighthouse.
Set in the late 1890s and making use of sources like Herman Melville’s writings and actual lighthouse-keepers’ journals for its idiosyncratic dialog, Eggers hasn’t just re-created the time period with The Lighthouse. He’s brought it back from the dead.
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It’s a delight catching up with all the Downton Abbey characters, both “upstairs” and “downstairs.” Fellowes’s screenplay and Engler’s direction also make it enjoyable enough that newbies can get something out of it, too. The movie retains what made the show work: characters in whom it’s easy to become invested and a marvelously recreated early 20th century setting.
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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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There’s been plenty of digital ink already spilled about Green Book being a White Savior Film. While I’ll also spill a bit of my own on the topic, there isn’t much I can add. For me – an average white dude who’s seen his fair share of movies – the most glaring fault about the picture, a dramedy dealing with race relations in the Jim Crow era, is the paint-by-numbers feeling of it all. This is a movie that strives to hit every standard beat in the uplifting “inspired by a true story” template. As an exercise in mediocrity that serves up something we’ve all seen dozens of times before, Green Book is an unparalleled success. It’s utterly predicable and is the kind of movie that would have felt fresh had it been made 20 or 30 years ago. Still, for all it’s flaws, Green Book isn’t entirely without its charms. In addition to a superb turn from actor Mahershala Ali, the movie does provide some inspiring moments and a message about race that plenty of people still haven’t absorbed.
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