With his longest film to date, Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour crime saga The Irishman allows the legendary director room to stretch his creative talents in ways we’ve never seen, even from masterpieces like Goodfellas and The Last Temptation of Christ. You can feel in every frame the mastery over the art form that the nearly-octogenarian Scorsese commands from his half-century of making movies. The film also aches with a sense of remorse and regret which comes from its subject, mafia hitman Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran. Scorsese has always been interested in exploring the wages of his characters’ sins, but that’s even more acute here in The Irishman.
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Leave it to the comedic genius behind movies like What We Do in the Shadows and Thor: Ragnarok – to date, the wackiest (and funniest) departure from the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s “house style” – to give us a Wes Anderson movie with Adolf Hitler as a supporting character. Apologies if that’s a bit reductive, but it’s too perfect a comparison not to make. Taika Waititi has established his own style and aesthetic in movies like Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, but in Jojo Rabbit, the Anderson comparisons are apt.
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I recently had the opportunity to speak with director Trey Edward Shults in anticipation of the release of his new film Waves. We had a brief, enjoyable conversation about what kind of storytelling interests him, as well as some of the technical aspects of his filmmaking. And don’t worry, I was sure to ask him what you’re all dying to know: whether he considers Marvel movies to be cinema or not.
Listen to interview podcast or read transcript...
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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Much of the negative criticism for documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’s American Dharma is aimed at Morris not challenging his subject enough on his beliefs. Steve Bannon, the right-wing luminary and short-lived White House Chief Strategist to Donald Trump – just a few of Bannon’s many roles on the world stage – is allowed to present himself as a towering figure of great foresight and heroism, the critics claim. What these critics have forgotten (or possibly don’t know), is that direct confrontation isn’t Morris’s preferred mode of operation. He’s said as much in a recent interview about American Dharma:
“I don’t really believe in adversarial interviews. I don’t think you learn very much. You create a theater, a gladiatorial theater, which may be satisfying to an audience, but if the goal is to learn something that you don’t know, that’s not the way to go about doing it. In fact, it’s the way to destroy the possibility of ever hearing anything interesting or new. I guess I don’t believe in them.”
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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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The Park family aren’t bad people, per se. They’re just completely oblivious to anything and anyone that doesn’t involve them directly. Their obscene wealth allows them that luxury. So, late in Parasite – director Bong Joon-ho’s savage satire on class – when a heavy rain storm causes catastrophic flooding in poor neighborhoods, Mrs. Park, Yeon-kyo, can only perceive how it has affected her. The heavy rains have washed away the grime of the city, she says. In fact, it’s really a blessing. And besides, the next day has brought sunshine and a beautiful afternoon, perfect for celebrating her son Da-song’s birthday. She says this to one of her servants, a member of the Kim family, whose semi-basement apartment was devastated by the flood.
That moment offers a stinging observation, one among many, of how the rich move effortlessly through the world, while the less fortunate struggle to survive. Just like Snowpiercer, Bong’s 2013 dystopian take on class struggle, Parasite is as socially conscious as it is wildly entertaining. His use of virtuoso camera technique, dense structure, surprising plot twists, and pitch-black humor coalesce into an unforgettable piece of cinema.
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Kevin Smith has officially given up on his film career. One of the seminal figures responsible for turning the word “independent” into a noun to describe an entire American cinema movement in the early-to-mid 1990s now can’t be bothered to come up with actual titles for his movies. The comedian/writer/podcaster, whose real career is simply being Kevin Smith, isn’t even interested in making sequels anymore. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot isn’t a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. This isn’t Clerks III or Mallrats 2. In Smith’s own words – because he clearly doesn’t give a shit who knows how lazy he’s become – Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is “literally the same fucking movie all over again.”
And let me tell you, he ain’t kidding.
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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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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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“I’m the bad guy?” That’s the question Michael Douglas’s character, William Foster, asks in the final minutes of the movie Falling Down. Despite the fact that the movie, up until that point, solidly aligns itself with Foster’s point of view and his sick sense of vigilante justice, this one line of dialog suggests that Falling Down is a more self-aware movie than director Todd Phillips’s Joker. There’s never any question that Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, who transforms himself over the course of this origin story into Batman’s greatest nemesis, is our champion.
And the movie seems to have no idea how disturbing that is.
The bleak, nihilistic Joker, which, by its final frames, leans into its fascism in a way that even the heavily reactionary Falling Down doesn’t, says a lot more about Phillips’s worldview than the character he is exploring.
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Ad Astra is a work of art that is singularly beautiful but structurally flawed. Writer/director James Gray, working here with cowriter Ethan Gross, attempts a tone of cosmic mystery in his space epic set in the near future. It’s about the personal connections humans make even as we search for extraterrestrial life.
For the most part it works; I found myself falling into the rhythm of Ad Astra even as certain of its elements continued to irritate me.
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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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So, with (most of) the nostalgia gone from this part of the story, what’s left? The answer is a movie that is, for the most part, consistent with its predecessor in creepy tone and jump-scare fun. Chapter Two also has some of the same problems as the first part, namely that we are asked to believe Pennywise the Clown is a merciless killer, except when it comes to our heroes. Whenever his target is one of our beloved Losers Club, Pennywise is suddenly very bad at his job. Chapter Two is also interminably long at 169 minutes, with a structure that feels more like a video game than a movie.
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This is the next entry 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 six is the first feature-length animated film ever produced: Walt Disney’s (with the help of dozens of artists) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I had the experience that probably most people would have upon sitting down to watch it: I know the basic story, the songs, and the characters (including all of the dwarfs), but I don’t know that I had ever actually watched the whole thing from beginning to end, aside from maybe when I was three years old. The movie is just so ingrained in our cultural memory, it’s easy to assume you’ve actually seen it, even if you haven’t. Just like the other films in the series, I borrowed a Blu-ray through intralibrary loan. It was the 2016 Disney Blu-ray release, and the film looks fantastic.
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This is the next entry 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 five is the romantic comedy It Happened One Night from 1934. Many hail the picture as the first screwball comedy ever made – although 1933’s Bombshell might have a little something to say about that. Class commentary and romance are the chief preoccupations of both the genre and It Happened One Night. I first saw the movie in college, about 800 years ago, so it’s technically a revisit, but this go-round was almost like seeing it for the first time. In fact, I might have slept through part of it in college; those 8 am classes were a killer… Just like the other films in the series, I borrowed a Blu-ray through intralibrary loan. The disc was produced in 2014 by the Criterion Collection, and although the majority of the film looks sparkling, there are a few shots that show how challenging the 4K restoration must have been.
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The horror/fantasy film Tigers Are Not Afraid is being compared favorably to the early work of director Guillermo del Toro. Like del Toro, its writer/director, Issa López, hails from Mexico, but the similarities go much deeper. The American distributor of the Spanish language Tigers – streaming service Shudder – is eager to encourage the connection to the Academy Award winning director of exquisitely crafted fantasy films like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water. Their publicity material features a quote from del Toro about the movie: “An unsparing blend of fantasy and brutality, innocence and evil. Innovative, compassionate and mesmerizing.”
I wasn’t nearly as impressed as Mr. del Toro.
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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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Late in the documentary Mike Wallace Is Here, there is a clip of the legendary reporter interviewing playwright Arthur Miller. Wallace asks Miller what the ultimate goal has been of Miller’s decades of work; what he’s been trying to achieve. “Oh, some little moment of truth,” Miller responds. Director Avi Belkin’s documentary about the life and career of Wallace has uncovered much more than that. His film explores not only the driving force of one man’s life, but how he in turn affected the entire profession of journalism, for better and for worse. Mike Wallace Is Here is a perceptive, unflinching look at what made Wallace tick.
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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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