Dead Man's Wire

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

DEAD MAN'S WIRE   ***

Gus Van Sant

2025

IDEA:  A fictionalized account of Tony Kiritsis's kidnapping of his mortgage broker, Richard Hall, in 1977 Indianapolis. 

BLURB:  You know social discontent is in the air when two movies, debuted within the same month, end with Gil Scott-Heron’s single “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” First it was PTA’s One Battle After Another, and here it is again, like an echoing mantra, in Gus Van Sant’s docudrama. The sense of déjà vu is apropos; not only is Dead Man’s Wire based on a documentary, the true story it recounts from nearly half a century ago is a version of something we’ve witnessed in varied forms over the intervening years. It’s that queasily familiar molotov cocktail of class grievance, violence, and the media circus, set off by people who end up in extreme situations because the system has seemingly given them no other choice. There is satisfying no-more-fucks-to-give fury in Bill Skarsgård’s nervy and garrulous (albeit curiously prettified) Tony Kiritsis, and Van Sant takes great care to show him as a polite, well-respected, and at times comically clumsy guy. Dead Man’s Wire recreates the events of his kidnapping of Richard Hall with a nod to news-media verisimilitude, often using crash zooms and freeze frames and craftily toggling between film and video formats, with the occasional insert of real historical news footage. Van Sant covers all sides in his portraiture, emphasizing a news media prone to sensationalism and reductive banalities, a legal system of questionable efficacy, and a financial world where callousness reigns (in the memorable form of a slothful, southern-fried Al Pacino). Significantly, the points of light are the two major Black characters: Colman Domingo’s radio DJ and Myha’la’s up-and-coming reporter, who exhibit actual human interest rather than procedural calculation. Dead Man’s Wire is tense and funny, if familiar to a fault, and it poses the important question: if the beleaguered worker with a gun is considered insane, what about the rich executive willing to ruin more lives than the worker ever could?

Young Mothers

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

YOUNG MOTHERS   **1/2

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

2025

IDEA:  A handful of young women living in a group home navigate their responsibilities as new mothers.

BLURB:  The typical Dardennes movie clings unwaveringly to the perspective of one or two characters, the narrative and visual focus so tight you feel by the end that you’ve become conjoined with them. Perhaps one of the problems with Young Mothers is that it lacks this sustained closeness, spread as it is among four protagonists who must share screen time without, strangely, spending very much of that time together. The Dardennes instead rotate between them, and as capable as all the young actresses are, they tend to blur together in their similar backgrounds and present situations. All are anxiously figuring out how, or if, to raise their babies as they variously wrestle with absent boyfriends, overbearing or absent parents, and legacies of abuse, poverty, and abandonment within their families. The cast is uniformly affecting, and there are individual scenes — a tussle with a selfish mom over her granddaughter, a boyfriend’s hospital visit to his drug-relapsed partner — that have the matter-of-fact immediacy and naked, disarming emotional force that are Dardennes hallmarks. In too many other instances, urgency and engagement are hampered by a script that is at once diffuse and obvious (“I don’t want to be like you,” explicates daughter to mom) and by images that don’t carry much visual interest. There will always be great use for media that empathically spotlights the oft-belittled experiences of young, vulnerable mothers, but it’s disappointing that Young Mothers doesn’t offer much beyond the commonplace.

The Secret Agent

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

THE SECRET AGENT   ***

Kleber Mendonça Filho

2025

IDEA:  In 1977 Recife, Brazil, a former university professor goes undercover as he's hunted by a vindictive government rival.

BLURB:  The Secret Agent is an epic political thriller light on conventional thrills, but this is by design; Mendonça is less interested in linear narrative momentum than creating a socio-historical panorama brimming with intricate, lived-in detail. In this way, the 1970s-set film sometimes recalls those contemporaneous Robert Altman works with their sprawling casts, meandering plots, and percolating mood of epochal turmoil. There are no optical zooms here (missed opportunity?), but there are vibrant anamorphic PanaVision and split diopters to give life to a complex tale of political persecution and the survival of memory through blood and media — and bloody media! Indeed, one of the most delightful threads running through The Secret Agent is the intertext of Spielberg’s Jaws, which comes to mediate between the spectacle of popular culture and that of a violent, predatory reality, both of which capture the public’s imagination in ways Mendonça creatively imagines. With the exception of its most traditional “genre” sequences, though — a bit of outré grindhouse play and a climactic gun chase — The Secret Agent eschews any such ratcheting Jaws-like suspense. The slackness, while allowing ample room for a panoply of distinct characters to reveal their many sides, does not always serve the film; one wishes for a little more juice, whether through narrative action, tonal variation, or formal surprise. The power rests in the depth of Mendonça’s script, which, like last year’s I’m Still Here, flashes forward to the present to show how the preservation of personal and historical memory, forever entwined, is ongoing work that involves us all.

Bugonia

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

BUGONIA   ***

Yorgos Lanthimos

2025

IDEA:  A battle of wills ensues after a conspiracy-obsessed man and his cousin kidnap a prominent female CEO they believe to be an evil alien.

BLURB:  Fittingly, 2025 has seen a number of films reflecting the yawning madness of our time, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia is a deliriously grotesque exemplar. Co-produced, surprise!, by Ari Aster (creator of the year’s even grimmer satire of American anomie, Eddington), Bugonia comes at its timely commentary by remaking someone else’s work, Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 film Save the Green Planet! In updating it, Lanthimos demonstrates how little has changed since then in regard to class struggle and capitalist exploitation, but also how one thing in particular has gotten exponentially worse: the Internet’s capacity, abetted by governments and corporations, to foster deranged echo chambers. Bugonia’s avatar of the incel-leaning conspiracy lunatic is Teddy (a scraggly, calmly maniacal Jesse Plemons), who is convinced the powerful CEO of a pharmaceutical company (an electrifying Emma Stone, head shaved like Joan of Arc) is a malicious alien. Lanthimos forcefully challenges our sympathies in the dynamic between the conspiracy-theorist kidnappers and their wealthy Big Pharma captive. Clearly Teddy is a psycho, but he is also erudite and eloquent and loves his cousin; most importantly, he’s dealing with a personal tragedy that adds justice to his pursuit. Bugonia arguably goes too hard in its efforts to make this man empathetic and intelligent, and conversely to paint the CEO as the monster Teddy claims she is. Are we to take any of this at face value, or merely as a parody of delusion intended to make us question a baseline of human sanity as endangered as ever? Lanthimos generates palm-sweating suspense and visceral unease throughout, filming with rich colors and pin-sharp closeups so vivid they burn. For all its outlandishness and maybe glibness, Bugonia ends with a montage of soul-shaking plangency, a lament for humanity summed up in a lyric from the evergreen closing song: “When will they ever learn…?”

Kontinental '25

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

KONTINENTAL '25   ***

Radu Jude

2025

IDEA:  A bailiff in the Romanian city of Cluj faces a moral crisis after a homeless squatter she evicts kills himself.

BLURB:  In Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51, a complacent socialite in postwar Italy has her social conscience awoken following the death of her young son, causing her to devote her life to charity for the poor. Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25 caustically reworks Rossellini’s humanist masterwork for the fractured, globalized late-capitalist present. The selfless altruism and rectitude epitomized by the beatific Ingrid Bergman are nowhere to be seen here; instead, we have Eszter Tompa’s crumpled, self-pitying Orsolya, whose feelings of crushing guilt related to the suicide of a homeless man lead not to sociopolitical action and solidarity but to an endless ruminative loop of egocentric rhetorical debates. Shot, like most of the film, on a locked-down, autofocusing iPhone 15, these long-take dialogues invariably go like so: Orsolya describes the precise process of the homeless man’s suicide to an interlocutor and desperately seeks absolution, and the interlocutor tries to console her by invoking the perspective of history, current events, or parables. Sometimes, Jude wryly sticks a piece of consumer technology at the edge of the screen, or has club music playing in the background, ribbing a society of distraction in which the here-and-now of systemic inequities are never meaningfully addressed. Disregarding Jude’s exciting penchant for dense intertextuality, we have seen this sort of critique of bourgeois acedia before in contemporary European cinema, and there can be the sense, as in many of those critiques, that Jude is complicit in the liberal guilt he bemoans. On the other hand, he is an artist, not a politician or humanitarian, and Kontinental ’25 is another of his probing, prickly opuses. 

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU   ***1/2

Mary Bronstein

2025

IDEA:  While dealing with the everyday struggles of raising a chronically-ill daughter, Linda is forced to contend with a massive hole in her ceiling and various other misfortunes. 

BLURB:  Harrowing, bitingly funny, and acutely synced to its protagonist’s spiraling subjectivity, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You sounds a protracted primal scream from a mother at the end of her rope. Rose Byrne’s Linda is a messy cinematic mom of the highest order, a complex figure of maternal ambivalence who at once embodies archaic tropes of monstrous motherhood and feminine volatility and turns them on their heads to expose the psychology underneath. If this mom is going crazy, she’s clearly well within reason, and as her mishaps escalate, Bronstein sharply conveys the social pressures imposed upon women, especially mothers, to serve as caretakers with seemingly unlimited attention and affection to give. But how does one give when they’re constantly being taken from, in a mental death by a thousand cuts? If I Had Legs I’d Kick You renders a woman’s exhausting emotional labor as a madcap nightmare of dissociation, of frayed nerves and attenuated focus and exasperated phone calls to men who can’t understand. In a surrealistic motif, Linda’s psychic unraveling is tied to the gaping hole in her ceiling, a familiar metaphor that grows more layered as Bronstein visually plays with its form and connotations of abjection. Yet the most indelible image in the film is Byrne’s face, almost always shot in febrile closeup as she stares down her gauntlet of trials. Unlike her character, the actress is firing on all cylinders and then some in a performance of searing affective intensity and rich behavioral detail, whether she’s futilely fishing for answers from a stolid Conan O’Brien or failing to take her own advice she gives to a client who is effectively her double. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You feels stretched pretty thin by the time it pays off an iffy visual conceit at its conclusion, but it’s also in that relentless stretch that it evokes the Sisyphean work of maternity. For Bronstein, if there is a kind of monstrousness in motherhood it is par for the course.