Marvel Cinematic Universe mastermind Kevin Feige’s style and design for the look and feel of the content he produces for his Disney overlords has calcified with his latest entry, Eternals. I use the dreaded word content – it’s a word that makes me throw up in my mouth a little; it’s more at home in a marketing meeting than discussions about art or entertainment – because that’s what Eternals feels like, rather than a story or a movie.
At an interminable 157 minutes, it’s an attempt at entertainment that bolsters Martin Scorsese’s assertion that Marvel movies are more theme park attraction than storytelling. Even as a 200-million-dollar rollercoaster, Eternals is lifeless and largely joyless. The only fun thing about it is a few of the performances where a human spark peaks through the calculatedness of it all.
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Iconic director Todd Haynes’s first documentary feature is a florid chronicling of an iconic band and larger artistic movement that was responsible for dissolving the line between so-called low-art and high culture. In The Velvet Underground, Haynes uses every tool at his disposal to transform what might have been a fairly conventional narrative arc into an artistic experience that approximates the environment that his subjects conjured in their own work.
The Velvet Underground is the story of a band every bit as influential as The Beatles who also worked in uncharted artistic waters. Revelatory interviews with surviving members John Cale and Maureen "Moe" Tucker, as well as dozens of other artists active in The Velvet Underground’s time and place in history, bring the band’s initial ten-year creative period – the mid-1960s to the mid- ‘70s – to vibrant life.
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The subtitle of The French Dispatch could have been: Wes Anderson makes me feel bad about myself. Modern (useless) Facebook meme pop-psychology would tell me that no one but me is responsible for the way I feel about myself. And yet. As someone who tries to move through the world with a reputation of being a cinephile, it took me watching about 20 minutes of Mr. Anderson’s new film to realize (as I do when I watch any of the director’s other films) how little I really know about this art form that I claim to cherish.
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I’ll start my review of Dune: Part One by using one epic fantasy tale to comment on another. In The Waste Lands, the third book of Stephen King’s sprawling Dark Tower series, Roland, the hero from another world, asks to hear stories from the Wizard of Oz books. His response when asked why is, “The quickest way to learn about a new place is to know what it dreams of.” Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of author Frank Herbert’s serpentine 1965 novel Dune dreams of a pitiless, insatiable greed for power and riches, colonialist subjugation of marginalized societies, and a savior who promises to right all. Fifty-five years after the publication of the source material, Villeneuve’s stunning translation of Dune for the screen shows that whether it be 2021, 1965, or 1065, humanity’s preoccupations haven’t changed much.
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The five-film arc of Daniel Craig’s stint as Agent 007 comes to a close in the emotionally satisfying, if overstuffed, finale No Time to Die. The movie, the release of which became as dramatic as its plot due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has storytelling stakes and an emotional weight like no Bond film that’s come before it. It also has approximately 1,438 moving parts and, at a whopping 163 minutes, suffers from a bloat which threatens to, but thankfully never succeeds in, sabotaging its best elements.
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I feel like I should have loved Titane. Possessor was one of my top ten films of last year. Climax was a disturbing yet exhilarating experience. I might not be an A#1 fan of the body horror genre, but I can certainly respect and enjoy it. I need a little something more under the surface, however, than director Julia Ducournau has on offer with Titane, her follow-up to 2016’s Raw – a film I haven’t seen, but about which I’ve heard good things. With Titane, Ducournau has a lot to say, and that’s part of the problem. The movie never gels into a cohesive whole. It’s merely an excuse to stage half-a-dozen or so incredibly shocking and provocative body horror set pieces.
Those set pieces, tho. They’re a definite gut-punch, and I won’t be forgetting them any time soon.
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The radiant and talented actor Jessica Chastain probably saw a certain little gold statue in her future when she bought the rights in 2012 to Tammy Faye Bakker’s life story. There’s nothing the Academy loves more in a best performance category than an actor radically altering her or his appearance for a role: Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull; Charlize Theron as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster; Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Oscar really loves it when beautiful people are perceived as uglying themselves up for a role.
Chastain certainly fits the bill with her performance as disgraced televangelist Bakker in the dramedy The Eyes of Tammy Faye. The phosphorescent makeup and wild hair styles that were Bakker’s trademarks make Chastain practically unrecognizable – especially in the latter parts of the film.
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The late-career renaissance that Paul Schrader started with his 2018 film First Reformed continues with his new picture, The Card Counter. The two movies have quite a bit in common; they work well as companion pieces. Both feature sparse storytelling techniques. While First Reformed is a purer example of slow cinema, The Card Counter certainly fits the transcendental filmmaking mold.
Schrader has a decades-long career obsession with examining psychologically broken protagonists seeking redemption and absolution. Both First Reformed and The Card Counter tackle systemic failures of society as a way into their main characters’ psyches. In First Reformed, it was climate change. In The Card Counter, it’s the United States government and military’s unconscionable orchestration of torture in the so-called “war on terror” of the Bush years.
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An essay in which I write about my wife (almost) as much as I write about movies.
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The newest iteration of the Candyman franchise does everything the original film wanted to do, but better. The 1992 slasher, which Bernard Rose directed and adapted from the Clive Barker short story, The Forbidden, only grazes the surface of the racial politics it claims to be interested in. The new Candyman explores race in a much more satisfying way. Director Nia DaCosta also uses a fresh and exciting approach to build and expand upon the mythology of the world.
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It would be facile to draw some kind of straight line directly from Charles Foster Kane to Donald John Trump. It’s probably been done in countless other essays after Trump ascended to the presidency as 2017 was getting under way. Beyond being facile, it’s almost certainly not true. That’s because the lesson at the heart of Citizen Kane, the kernel which blossoms into a mighty oak as the film unfolds, is that, as a character says of Kane during the movie, “No one word can describe a man’s life.” You can extrapolate that out into the idea that no person, famous or not, scoundrel or not, is one single thing.
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Released in the late summer of 1984, Buckaroo Banzai was a financial disaster. The movie made only a little over six million dollars against its 17-million-dollar budget. But the wacky sci-fi yarn built a strong cult following on home video. There are now multiple generations of fans lamenting that we’ll most likely never see the sequel that was teased at the end of the movie, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. The title alone makes one’s imagination run wild!
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If you know anything about Ron and Russell Mael of the band Sparks, you know they’re only interested in pleasing themselves when it comes to their art. (If you don’t know anything about Sparks, you can learn quite a lot, like I did, from the new Edgar Wright documentary about the band, called The Sparks Brothers.) If you know who Leos Carax is, it’s likely you’ve seen his 2012 film Holy Motors, so you know how visually inventive and wacked-out his singular aesthetic is.
This trio of artists have come together to create a sui generis piece of cinema in Annette. A sort of rock opera by way of the French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – Carax also hails from France – Annette is by turns uplifting, depressing, silly, and hopelessly bleak. That wild mixture makes for a heady experience in certain moments, but it also never quite gels into a cohesive whole. Add to that a lead performance from Adam Driver that is, while bold and an example of an actor challenging himself, emotionally distant, which made it hard for me to connect with.
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I think No Sudden Move might be great. Like, Chinatown great. I’m hedging with the “might be” – one of the worst sins a critic can commit, I suppose – because I’ve only seen Steven Soderbergh’s new noir-inflected heist movie once. As with Chinatown and The Big Sleep, the most famously convoluted noir plot in film history, No Sudden Move’s first half is so opaque as to be frustrating on first viewing. Once things started to click into place, though, especially in the climax and denouement, I began to suspect that a second viewing of the film would pay substantial dividends. Even if that’s not the case, what’s easy to see upon first viewing is Soderbergh’s masterful auteur cinematic style and the flawlessly calibrated performances from the brilliant ensemble cast.
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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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The immensely talented musician and writer Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson has righted a historical injustice with his debut directorial film Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). The documentary, about an, until now, almost completely forgotten music festival that took place during the same summer as Woodstock, is a work of infectious exuberance as well as a contemplative examination of why the festival was forgotten in the first place.
Focusing on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Questlove’s picture would be a significant achievement for its restoration and presentation of the festival performances alone. Forty hours of videotape footage of the event sat in a basement for fifty years before producer Robert Fyvolent secured the rights and brought it to Questlove’s attention.
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"I think it's bittersweet. I've had an incredible decade working with my Marvel family. I'm going to miss not seeing them every 18 months or two years, like those kind of milestones I always really look forward to.” It’s fitting that this is how actor Scarlett Johansson described the (seeming) end of her run in the MCU as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow. (MCU overlord Kevin Feige recently said he’s open to Johansson returning to the MCU, if the conditions are right.)
It’s fitting because Black Widow’s standalone movie, delayed for over a year because of COVID, is all about family. Black Widow is a worthy send-off for both the character and Johansson. The picture features some bravura action sequences. I have reservations about a few developments in the film’s last third, but they’re overshadowed by the genuinely fun time I had while watching the latest entry in the MCU.
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Alcohol plays a crucial role in the plot of The Philadelphia Story. I mention that because the film was released in 1940, a mere seven years after the end of prohibition. The Broadway play that served as the source material premièred the year before. As screwball comedies go, this one is about a five on the zany scale, with the full-blast Bringing Up Baby peaking that scale at a ten. It’s an amiable enough picture, relying mostly on the charms of its stellar cast, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart.
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Let me tell you a story. Have you heard of the Broadway musical Hamilton? Of course you have. Well, the guy who created it and launched a phenomenon wrote another musical before he set the world on fire with Hamilton. It was called In the Heights, and it was also a success, running a little under three years for 1,184 performances on Broadway. After having seen the touring version of Hamilton, the filmed version of the Broadway production – the world is waiting for a proper movie version – and listening to the cast recording on repeat (my wife fell in love with it when the show really caught fire in 2016), I felt I had a handle on what creator Lin-Manuel Miranda is all about. After seeing the film adaptation of In the Heights, that assessment is confirmed. LMM is a champion of unabashed optimism and joy.
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The one-line synopsis for director Theo Anthony’s new documentary, All Light, Everywhere, says everything and nothing all at once. The movie “explore[s] issues of subjective perception and fallibility in both human and technological modes of surveillance.” That description is slippery because All Light, Everywhere is about that idea, how humans see things, but it’s explored in a hundred different ways. Anthony takes the epistemological method of dialectics – presenting opposing points-of-view of a topic as a way to uncover its truths – to new heights with his film.
Dialectical montage, the editing technique pioneered in early Soviet silent cinema by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, in which two contradictory images are juxtaposed in order to create a new, third meaning, is used to soaring effect in All Light. It doesn’t quite all hang together; by the picture’s last passage, I got the feeling that Anthony might have been ultimately overwhelmed by his material. His film is, overall, an exhilarating experience. It implicates the very act of its own creation in its exploration of the flaws of human observation. All Light, Everywhere destroys the conventional wisdom that “seeing is believing.”
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