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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You can take the title of the documentary Human Nature as a reference to a few different ideas the film raises. Probably the most apparent – especially after you’ve seen the movie – is the way a recent and revolutionary scientific discovery brings with it the ability for the human species to alter our very nature, what makes us human. I took it as a nod to our one unique trait, the thing that has caused all of our triumphs and pain. Our human nature is defined by our complex brains and our endless quest for discovery and knowledge about how the universe works. That knowledge, as one man puts it in archival footage of a scientific conference that opens the film, can be used either “for deliverance, or equally for disaster.”
Human Nature is a thought-provoking film that is by turns wondrous and terrifying.
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There are perhaps three scenes in the film Swallow that actually achieve an emotional truth that resonated with me. They all feature the main character, Hunter, and her interactions with people trying to help her. Two of those scenes are between Hunter and her therapist. One takes place under a bed. Hunter has crawled under it to escape the world. Richie, Hunter’s husband, along with his parents, have hired Luay, a caretaker from Damascus, to look after Hunter. Luay crawls under the bed with her to make sure she’s alright and to keep her company. These scenes made me believe the connections between the characters within them.
The rest of the movie is filled with interactions I didn’t believe for a second.
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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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Birds of Prey might be the most entertaining DC movie yet – yes, including Wonder Woman – even though I have a few major reservations about it. The cast, just about down to a person, are all going for broke here. Director Cathy Yan’s handling of the action sequences, especially one that involves our hero, a one Harley Quinn, chasing a speeding car on roller skates, is inventive and fresh. The movie’s tone, while still a bit on the bleak side (this is the DC universe, after all), is sarcastic, snide, and overall pretty funny. That all translates into a mostly enjoyable time with this latest comic book movie outing.
Still, the movie’s absolute glee at its own disturbing level of violence was somewhat off-putting.
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The documentary Citizen K filters the last thirty years of revolutionary upheaval and the march toward dictatorial rule in Russia through one man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In the form of Khodorkovsky – the Citizen K of the title – director Alex Gibney reveals a complicated figure and gives us the unlikeliest of heroes. The thread of personal metamorphosis that Gibney tracks in Citizen K is what makes it such a dynamic and thought-provoking film.
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What’s the next step up from cotton candy when comparing entertainment to food? Pop rocks? Gummy bears? I’m asking because Netflix’s release To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You is that. It’s not as ephemeral as cotton candy; it feels more substantial. That’s mostly due to its charm, which comes from the effervescence of the entire cast. P.S. is the sequel to Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the movie that took the internet by storm in 2018. Both films are based on author Jenny Han’s trilogy of best-selling books. The third film is in post-production as of this writing.
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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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If you're planning on watching the Oscars tonight, but you didn't have a chance to play catch-up with most of the nominees, I'm here to help. It's no fun when you watch an awards show but you know next to nothing about the movies that are up for the big awards. So, I've collected my reviews for all nine Best Picture nominees, and I've also ranked them in order of what I'd like to see win. Number one is what I most want to win, number nine is what I least want to win. I haven't provided any commentary besides the ranking, because if you want to know what I think of each one, you can just click the link and read my original review. I've also included links to my reviews for movies nominated in other categories. Happy reading, and happy viewing tonight!
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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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 seven needs no introduction, really. It’s a movie that most of us know by heart and have seen dozens of times. It’s The Wizard of Oz. I’ve probably seen it a dozen or more times, but this viewing was certainly the closest attention I’ve ever paid in terms of theme and production detail. I tried my hardest not to simply be swept away to the magical land of Oz; that’s no easy feat, which you know if you love the movie as much as I do. Like every other film in the series so far, I borrowed a Blu-ray through intra-library loan. It was the 2013 release in commemoration of the film’s 75th anniversary. The transfer is gorgeous.
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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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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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Do not believe director J.J. Abrams when he tells you that his movie, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, isn’t a rebuke of the hard left turn that Rian Johnson took with his installment, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. This last trilogy in The Skywalker Saga – which includes Episodes I-IX – gives the world what I think is the first ever rap-style beef between film directors, at least in blockbuster filmmaking.
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I was able to tease out a distinct theme in over half of the movies on my “best of” list this year. The theme is a grandness of scale. A lot of the movies on this list are telling big stories. Either the ambition of the characters or subjects is larger than life, as in number 5, or the cinematic scope of the filmmaker is immense, as in numbers 2, 3, and 4. Or, it’s a little bit of both, as in numbers 1 and 6.
Even the smaller films feel big and important in their own way (numbers 8 and 9).
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The most visceral cinematic experience of the year has arrived. Director Sam Mendes has used every technical flourish up his sleeve to conjure the astonishing World War I film 1917. If you were at all wowed by the virtuosity of the unbroken opening tracking shot of 2015’s Spectre – Mendes’s second James Bond outing – then 1917 won’t disappoint you. What Mendes achieved with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema in the first five minutes of Spectre, he manages to sustain for the entire 119-minute running time of 1917.
This time out, he’s working with Roger Deakins, master cinematographer and elder-statesperson of the profession. Deakins adds his gorgeous photography from films like No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to lithe, dumbfounding continuous camera movement. The combination makes 1917 an unforgettable piece of art.
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The North Texas Film Critics Association (NTFCA), of which I am a member, voted this month to honor the best films of 2019. As an organization, the NTFCA is proud to call attention to outstanding achievements in the craft of filmmaking. I consider movies to be not only entertainment, but in the best examples, they are also art. They teach us about the human condition. Here are the winners for each category in which we voted:
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