A House of Dynamite

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE   ***1/2

Kathryn Bigelow

2025

IDEA:  Government officials at all levels scramble to stop a single nuclear missile heading toward the United States.

BLURB:  To use another explosives metaphor, A House of Dynamite is a ticking time bomb that never goes off, a doomsday thriller that holds the audience in a nerve-jangling suspension where the end may be in sight but it can never be (fore)seen. This is an existentialist premise Oppenheim and Bigelow boldly fit inside the trappings of a nuts-and-bolts government procedural, whose ostensible real-time elapsing is subverted through structural repetition. The nonlinear triptych storytelling, more than gradually layering in new perspectives and information, has the simultaneous effect of putting us in the shoes of various agents at a single, hasty moment of heart-racing danger and stretching out that moment into a condition of permanent uncertainty. There are about 20 minutes until possible nuclear armageddon, but there’s also that times three, or the nearly two hours of the film’s runtime, but really there’s an indefinite period of potentiality, and A House of Dynamite makes us queasily sit in it. As she does so well, Bigelow creates suspense through a sense of human control slipping away under our own massive apparatuses of power. Her vérité style, marked by Barry Ackroyd’s handheld camera and Kirk Baxter’s fast cutting, captures basically ordinary people negotiating the minutia of a situation that is anything but ordinary. Oppenheim’s script uses a clichéd shorthand to quickly humanize these people (uniformly by giving them spouses or kids), but it’s mostly bracing in how it conveys the impossibility of their professional decision-making, and the contingencies of bureaucracy, technology, and emotion that influence it. A House of Dynamite leaves us with the chilling reality (or is it insanity?) that our lines of defense are not nearly as powerful as our means of destruction. 

The Stranger

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

THE STRANGER   ***

François Ozon

2025

IDEA:  In late-1930s Algiers, a Frenchman dispassionately murders an Arab man and is put on trial.

BLURB:  Ozon directs his adaptation of Camus’ The Stranger with an icy remoteness verging on sterility. Everything is starchy and obstinate and clinically pristine, from the sun-blasted whites of Manu Dacosse’s B&W cinematography to Benjamin Voisin’s impassive, statuesque figure. In the first half of the film, this affect can be fairly stifling, and perhaps counterintuitive; there are moments when Voisin’s perfectly manicured Meursault is photographed like a matinee idol in a perfume ad rather than an existential enigma (granted, there may be some overlap). But the remove that feels much like lifelessness becomes, appropriately, more charged in the second half. In the pivotal killing that cleaves The Stranger in two, Ozon adds a queer subtext that reframes the story in compelling ways. Cornering the recumbent Arab, Meursault looks at the man's exposed armpit in a POV shot before he is blinded by the glare of his phallic knife in another; the scene links Meursault to a repressed homoeroticism that is metonymically doubled by his country’s repression of the ethnic Other. Does Meursault have an unconscious desire and/or empathy for the Arab, seeing in his social marginalization a mirror of his own “strangeness,” and thus reaffirming the absurdity of the colonial apparatus? Ozon makes this a possibility, and if it potentially undercuts some of the stoic apathy in Camus, it offers new avenues for reading a character and a story that have been exhaustively pored over. This version of The Stranger still ends up in the embrace of the world’s gentle indifference, anyway, and then, in a surprising revisionist coda, at the site where that indifference is most soberingly evident.

Strange River

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

STRANGE RIVER   ***1/2

Jaume Claret Muxart

2025

IDEA:  On a summer trip with his family in Germany, the teenaged Dídac is drawn to a mysterious boy he encounters in the water.

BLURB:  Jan Monter, the young lead actor of Strange River, has the perfect face for such a cryptic and bewitching film. With his sphinx-like mien and wide azure eyes that are less like windows than frosted glass, he entrances the camera with an alluring unknowability. It is the unknowability of a teenager to his parents, but also maybe to himself, to desires and fears that have yet to autonomously crystallize outside the safety of the family unit. For Jan Monter’s Dídac, still waters run deep, and for Jaume Claret Muxart, in his feature directorial debut, bodies of water carry timeworn connotations of life, death, eroticism, and irrationality. While hardly reinventing the tropes of the summer coming-of-age tale, Strange River captivates from its shimmeringly sensual surface to the hints of its quivering undercurrents. Pablo Paloma’s 16 mm cinematography is a thing of immaculate jewel-like beauty, radiant with estival greens and blues and lightly sunburned skin. In becalmed long takes, landscapes and bodies are rendered with tactile presence, as in the engulfing depths of the river or the goose-bumpy flesh of a boy swimming right up against the camera. At the same time, Strange River is an abstraction, an otherworldly dance of moonlit ripples and twink(ly) apparitions taking place in a liminal zone. Muxart gives us just enough narrative shading to make sense of the sullen Dídac, prone to sudden breakdowns, and to grasp the precarious balance of his family, his relationship toward parents and especially brothers from whom he’s awkwardly growing apart. But the tender, laconic Strange River’s primary language is visual and corporeal, expressing itself in glances and breaths and a prominent hickey, still ruddy and fresh.

Sound of Falling

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

SOUND OF FALLING   ***1/2

Mascha Schilinski

2025

IDEA:  The lives of four generations of women are glimpsed across nearly a century in and around a farmhouse estate in east Germany.

BLURB:  Sound of Falling is a mighty, forbidding cataract of densely woven visuals and soundscapes as likely to leave one awed as flummoxed. Despite its periodization, it doesn’t so much narrate a history of reverberating domestic terrors as impressionistically embody their affects, which, perhaps, escape narrativization. Floating across time, inhabiting multiple points of view (including, often, a conspicuous 8 mm camera gaze), and slipping through an indistinguishable mesh of reality, memory, and imagination, Sound of Falling conducts an excavation of sedimented psychic pain in which all that can be recovered are the ghostly traces. With the source of trauma never seen or understood — obscured as it is by the inchoate, restricted POVs of the young female protagonists and the silence of their elders — Schilinski offers up strange, looping audiovisual effusions that suggest what can’t be made visible. These have a chilling, Gothic dream logic: a pale blonde girl clad in black, recreating an old photo of an identical forebear sitting limp on a sofa beside a pair of dolls; a lamprey clamping down between a woman’s index finger and thumb; all the titular falling, into rivers and on barn floors, accompanied by crackling vinyl (or film projector?) sounds. Schilinski refuses to moor us in this seething transhistorical miasma, even as we sometimes hear characters in voiceover poetically give shape to their thoughts and feelings (“It’s funny how something can hurt when it’s not there anymore”). This excessive fragmentation can make it a trying task to keep track of or even identify characters, timelines, and events. Surely, as well, this is part of Schilinski’s design, a deliberately discombobulating invocation of affects that seep across temporal boundaries and take ahold of you, like a woman who can’t control her smile (or gag reflex), with involuntary power.

Sirāt

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

SIRĀT   ***

Óliver Laxe

2025

IDEA:  A father, accompanied by his young son, goes searching for his missing daughter amid a Moroccan rave.

BLURB:  Against the desolate, parched expanses of the Western Sahara, Sirāt stages the most austere of contemporary apocalypses. It’s preceded by, what else, a bunch of people lost in their own world(s), completely absorbed by the throbbing bass that has possessed their bodies on a desert dance floor. As Kangding Ray’s techno score booms from towers of subwoofers, Laxe shows us images of blissed-out revelers that could be straight from Burning Man or Coachella, with a majority white young coterie that has claimed a remote open land as their party ground. In Sirāt, it is Europeans in Africa and their attendant legacy of colonialism that shadow the film’s vague geopolitical catastrophe, a “World War III” that abruptly breaks down the rave and sends a ragtag group deep into the Saharan flatlands. On the perilous road trip, Laxe harnesses his considerable audiovisual talents to create a blanched nightmare from endless dust, rocks, and glaring sun, Ray’s techno music now a foreboding presence from beyond instead of a proximal glue for embodied fellow-feeling. Ultimately, the explosiveness of the bass becomes more than figurative, and dancing to forget is no longer an option. The final act of Sirāt is almost excruciatingly tense in its manipulations of movement, timing, and sound and the expectancy they build in the spectator. Laxe’s carefully controlled horror is, in the same breath, kind of crass, turning death into a game of chicken for the mortified First World subject. Once again, we have a European film largely about European sociopolitical myopia that centers European characters in a land that isn’t theirs. Muslim characters appear only on the periphery as nameless refugees in a mythical crisis of passage, which the film appropriates as its title. Sirāt is finally potent and problematic in ways not easily extricable. 

Miroirs No. 3

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

MIROIRS NO. 3   **1/2

Christian Petzold

2025

IDEA:  After surviving a car crash in rural Germany, a young woman decides to stay with the elder woman who witnessed the accident.

BLURB:  Miroirs No. 3 is set in a small rural German town that simultaneously gives off the air of a fairytale idyll and a pastoral purgatory. Petzold holds these qualities in gentle dialectical tension, suggesting the murky space where emotional comfort morphs into psychological stasis. Can you go back home after a tragedy? Should you? Nothing is ever clear in Petzold’s taciturn story, in which his quartet of main characters float around each other tentatively putting up bridges — familial, possibly romantic — that never quite line up. There is a pointed gendered divide between the surrogate mother-daughter pairing, who are associated with housework, and the men of the family, who spend all their time in a garage fixing cars. Without necessarily reasserting stereotypes, Petzold indicates a fundamental rift in the ways women and men communicate, or don’t. His approach is spartan, at times recalling Bresson in its stark (albeit color-saturated) mise en scène and withholding of information. The issue is that he too-often confuses the mere act of reticence for human mystery, with silences and elisions that are more empty than pregnant. Miroirs No. 3 just doesn’t give the spectator much to hang onto, although its short-story-like nature at least lends it a pleasing brevity.