The Phoenician Scheme

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME   ***1/2

Wes Anderson

2025

IDEA:  Hunted and sabotaged by his adversaries, a wealthy business tycoon embarks on a quest with his appointed heir - his only daughter - to convince his associates to fund his newest and biggest project. 

BLURB:  The title sequence of The Phoenician Scheme — a long-take, slow-motion overhead shot of a monochromatic and sparsely furnished bathroom — heralds a simpler Wes Anderson than we’ve become accustomed to over the last decade-plus. The ensuing film has few of his most extravagant (and irritating) formal indulgences: no meta framing device or laborious stories within stories, no chaotic profusions of onscreen text, no constant shifting between aspect ratios and time periods, and not as many elaborate camera movements or overstuffed images. There’s still a sprawling cast of characters, but the narrative is focalized around just two (maybe three) of them, harkening back to the more intimate emotional worlds of Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel. At its core, The Phoenician Scheme is the story of an amoral megalomaniac finding spiritual redemption by reconnecting with his estranged daughter. This is old ground for Anderson, and arguably exhausted by this point, but the situational detail, humor, and pathos he brings to the characterizations of Zsa-Zsa Korda and Liesl are so finely realized it feels like a cleansing distillation rather than a retread. Benicio del Toro cuts a magnetic figure as a worldly grandiose scoundrel, and Mia Threapleton is a mordant delight as the vexed novitiate daughter who grudgingly comes along on her father’s mission. Biblical allusions, transcultural mischief, and cinematic inter-texts abound (hello, A Matter of Life and Death!), but the film moves with a streamlined linearity that never loses sight of the relationship at its center. The Phoenician Scheme wraps that affecting parent-child rapprochement in a witty fairytale adventure that also has something to say about the abuse of power in a global capitalist world (shades of a certain U.S. president-turned-felon are unmissable). Maybe a person like Korda being humbled is a fantasy in real life, but in Anderson’s malleable and merciful alternate universe, it’s blessedly achievable. 

You and the Night

YOU AND THE NIGHT   **1/2

Yann Gonzalez

2013

IDEA:  A collection of people, all dealing with some kind of loss, come together one night for an orgy.

BLURB:  In the liminal, deeply Freudian dream-space of You and the Night, archetypes are destabilized and primal narratives rewritten as a group of characters find release through the dissolution of boundaries. Ironizing the Breakfast Club-esque cast stereotypes, Gonzalez establishes a queer found family of profoundly fluid subject positions. From the fey maid Udo, who combines a godlike paternal omnipotence with sexual servility and maternal care; to the Stud, who represents a hysterical inversion of the role of the phallus as productive power symbol; to Ali and Matthias, who enact a gender-swapped Orphic narrative, the characters deform heteronormative roles, becoming bonded in a psychosocial structure where familial love and erotic intimacy are totally blurred. Although it’s self-reflexive and campy to the core, You and the Night is deadly serious about its characters’ emotional journeys, casting an earnestness over the film that at times dampens Gonzalez’s bawdy sense of play. What the film most excels at is creating a mood of hallucinatory atemporality, a cinematic purgatory constructed from fake backgrounds, deep shadow, neon color, and untraceable ambient sounds. It’s pure pastiche in the tradition of the New Queer Cinema, shot through with melodrama that attempts to reach the soul-churning heights of Fassbinder. You and the Night might not quite make it there, but its sense of renewal in loss, encapsulated in an anti-Orphic ending of trust and surrender set against a wintry sunrise, proves quite moving.

Sorry, Baby

Part of my coverage of the 12th Chicago Critics Film Festival.

SORRY, BABY   **1/2

Eva Victor

2025

IDEA:  An academic attempts to put her life back together in the wake of an assault by her professor.

BLURB:  Eva Victor is clearly a talent. In Sorry, Baby, she crafts a spunky, sarcastic, and deeply fraught character who is both instantly familiar and her own squirmy, idiosyncratic thing. With a countenance somehow simultaneously sleepy and mischievous, projecting both young-adult nonchalance and malaise, she makes Agnes into a memorably messy twenty-something comic heroine à la Greta Gerwig’s Frances Halladay, or Melanie Mayron’s Susan from Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends. Like the films containing those characters, Sorry, Baby concerns the intimacy of female friendship and the experience of being a young woman at an uncertain, vulnerable life juncture. What Victor is tackling here is several magnitudes more harrowing, though, making the film’s negotiation of comedy and personal trauma feel quite audacious, if not totally successful. Often, Victor’s penchant for a sardonic crack results in glibness and contrived, self-flattering righteousness, as in a scene at a doctor’s office that’s meant to be feminist but mostly plays like unearned mockery. Sorry, Baby indicates some ways in which women are consistently let down by social systems, but rather than pursuing this thorny path it prefers a palatably bittersweet journey of self-healing that serves a good helping of platitudes along with the snippy bon mots. And yet Victor, at the center, is a lovably nervy presence, given strong support from Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, and John Carroll Lynch in a poignant one-scene part. It’s a promising feature debut from a burgeoning auteur who, like Agnes, has plenty of time to grow.

Twinless

Part of my coverage of the 12th Chicago Critics Film Festival.

TWINLESS   ***

James Sweeney

2025

IDEA:  Two men form a close bond after meeting in a support group for twins who have lost their twin.

BLURB:  There’s always been something vaguely reactionary about the term “bromance,” as if a close relationship between men requires a whimsical title as reassurance of nothing unusual (read: homosexual) going on. Although never uttered in Twinless, the word shadows the almost-parodically convivial partnership of Dennis and Roman in the first section of the film. Then, Sweeney pulls the rug out from under the audience, reframing the salutary simplicity of his “bromance” as a relationship predicated on grief, obsession, envy, sexual tension, and an aching hunger for companionship. One of the parties here may be gay, but his desire for his newfound friend ultimately has less to do with this fact than with a more primal lack in his life he’s trying to fill; to place this friend into the dual role of recovered twin and lover. This might make Twinless sound intensely psychological, but despite some flirtations with thriller territory, Sweeney keeps the film mostly within the bounds of romantic comedy, which makes his provocative ingredients seem all the spikier. As in his excellent first feature, Straight Up, the writer-director-star shows a gift for badinage that brings to mind the screwball greats, mixed with a Woody Allen-like erudite neuroticism and a taste for dark absurdism that feels wholly Millennial. Sweeney’s wit infuses the pinpoint editing, as well, and at times appears in visual conceits such as a split-screen and a fractal zoom effect. While Twinless can occasionally feel a bit too unserious in its handling of heavy subject matter, it always returns to the anchoring emotions of Sweeney and Dylan O’Brien, a terrifically-paired duo who create a friendship that is brotherly and romantic but mostly happily unclassifiable. 

Sinners

SINNERS   ***

Ryan Coogler

2025

IDEA:  Having returned from Chicago to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932, gangster twin brothers face a supernatural evil in their community.

BLURB:  It’s a measure of the (mostly) successful ambition of Sinners that it manages to logically and intuitively tie together Jim Crow-era racial politics, vampire lore, African mysticism, and an ethnomusicological dyad of blues and Irish folk songs. Not to mention, Coogler stuffs all this and more into a diegetic story that, for the most part, spans just 24 hours. The execution is not faultless - things sometimes get bogged down in exposition, there are too many characters to properly develop, and the images could use more light (or better exposure) - but the film is rarely less than compelling in its rowdy, adventurous concoction of big ideas and genre thrills. Coogler has some concepts that are extremely clever: for one, allegorizing white American society in terms of a literal vampiric consumption, and absorption, of Black culture, specifically music in this case. The film complicates any neat racial dichotomy by making the vampire leader an Irish immigrant, connecting the social plight and musical heritage of his people to that of the African-American experience. He offers the Black characters a tempting escape cloaked in a paternalistic pretext of unity that is familiar to any oppressed group: an assimilation into an established, and thus “safe,” order. Without moralizing about the individual decisions his characters make in response to this assimilation, Sinners nevertheless stands against religious and cultural hegemony, with its idiom-melding song-score serving as a celebration of polyphonic expression. It’s the surprising and poignant coda that finally coalesces the film’s existential thesis that music, as a time-crossing vessel for history and memory, is an immortal thing born from mortality. 

The Quiet Man

THE QUIET MAN   **

John Ford

1952

IDEA:  Upon returning to his birthplace in Ireland to purchase his old family home, an Irish-American former boxer gets involved with a local woman and her tyrannical brother, who had his eyes on the property.

BLURB:  The Quiet Man is a romance and a comedy in which the romance, as it were, is based on a caveman’s idea of courtship, and the comedy is mostly comprised of a checklist of stereotypes about Irish people. Some would argue that Ford is lampooning the hidebound sociocultural mores of Old Ireland, and this feels at least half-true, but it is difficult to deny how he is also reinscribing a sexist gender politics that squares awfully well with the era in which the film was made. The Quiet Man would be satirical, perhaps, if we weren’t supposed to swoon when John Wayne forces himself on a perfectly acquiescent Maureen O’Hara in a golden-hued cabin during a windstorm, or if the sight of him literally dragging her across a field by her collar was intended to elicit the appropriate horror rather than laughter. Instead, the film wants us to root for this dreadful pairing and charm to its pseudo-screwball connubial violence, to identify with John Wayne as a white knight, because, hey, anything beats being shackled to your oafish alcoholic brother for a lifetime, right? Meanwhile, Ford’s affection for his ancestral homeland is obvious behind the Oirish caricatures, but it doesn’t make them less lazy, nor the film’s transformation into a slap-happy slapstick farce in the last act any less jarring. The Quiet Man is very well-made, because the man behind the camera was an exceptionally skilled filmmaker, but it’s hard to take any claims of its greatness without serious skepticism. 

Top 10 - 2024

 

There's no two ways about it: as a year, on the global scale, 2024 was a real annus horribilis. It was also an exceedingly strange film year, due at least in part to the lingering effects of the 2023 writers' strike. I saw plenty of movies I liked, but far fewer than normal that I really loved, and for the second year in a row, I had deep ambivalences about many of the most critically lauded titles, including the Palme d'Or and Oscar Best Picture recipient Anora. As a result, my list arguably looks more idiosyncratic than ever, with a flavorful array of (largely underrated) American and international independents flanking one bonafide Hollywood blockbuster. 

Find my top ten films of 2024 after the jump!