Attenberg

ATTENBERG   ***

Athina Rachel Tsangari

2010

IDEA:  Living with her terminally ill father in a small industrial seaside village in Greece, 23-year-old Marina struggles with issues of intimacy and independence. 

BLURB:  Leading from its title — a mispronunciation of the last name of Sir David Attenborough — Attenberg depicts a society in which language and conventional structures fail to adhere. Not only is the figure of symbolic authority, the father, literally on his deathbed, his power is already diminished in the eyes of his daughter Marina (a persuasively guileless and ungainly Ariane Labed), who imagines him without a phallus. Marina is in a psycho-developmental limbo where social institutions introduce a radical otherness she’s unable to assimilate. So she regresses into the pre-verbal, anti-social comfort of acting like an animal, or mirroring her friend Bella in a bodily synchrony that forestalls the anxiety of difference. This colorful, confounding dysfunction is often played for droll comedy, but it never yields the kind of shock-jock sadism that sometimes infects the work of Tsangari’s fellow Greek Weird Wave auteur Yorgos Lanthimos (who, ironically, appears in this film as its most normal, affable character). The behavioral perversity and formal austerity that comprise Attenberg are undergirded by empathy for Marina’s clumsy stabs at self-actualization, a process Tsangari analogizes to a wider, Greek national crisis of identity formation. At the same time, for all its quirks, the film mostly hews to the beats of a typical coming-of-age story, including the retrograde implication that maturity is achieved through heterosexual sex. But Tsangari leaves us not with her heroine’s triumphant initiation into adulthood, but with an ominously lingering shot of one of the industrial landscapes that have appeared throughout the film as a sign of stunted growth. The construction continues.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER   ***1/2

Jean-Luc Godard

1967

IDEA:  Housewife and prostitute Juliette goes about her day in a modernizing Parisian banlieue. 

BLURB:  How does one write about 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her? It’s a question Godard must have anticipated, considering how much the film is about the limits of language and the inadequacy of words in capturing the complexity of people, feelings, and experiences. The image might not be much better, the auteur mischievously and ironically suggests, whether he’s self-reflexively debating which ones to use in his film or trying to limn a consumer capitalist culture where images are reduced to commodity signs, and people and things are reduced to images. Yet Godard’s own capacity for communication never seems stymied, even when he’s at his most willfully abstruse and audience-antagonistic (a tendency that was about to become much more obnoxious). With Raoul Coutard’s vibrant color cinematography and production design festooned with commercial objects, 2 or 3 Things uses the surfaces of consumer culture to reflect on what they conceal. The film’s digressive, disruptive form resists the efficiency and digestibility of the society it critiques. Godard conveys meaning through oblique vignettes and juxtapositions: an apartment serving simultaneously as a brothel and daycare; prostitutes with airline-branded tote bags on their heads; overloud urban noises and men pulling random quotes from piles of books. There is acid cynicism in the resulting collage of a deranged modernity, but there is also freedom in taking it all apart, in letting the actor-objects shoot back our gaze and muse on the frustrations and desires unsolved by materialism, on granting fashion magazines and groceries existential weight. Maybe, a cup of coffee really can reveal the universe.

Leviticus

LEVITICUS   **1/2

Adrian Chiarella

2026

IDEA:  After being subjected to a religious ritual to cleanse them of their homosexuality, two teenage boys find themselves hunted by an entity that takes the form of the other. 

BLURB:  A recent trend in LGBTQ indie filmmaking has used the horror genre to explore religious bigotry, physicalizing sexual oppression as a deadly supernatural force preying on gay youth in conservative communities (see Almamula and Ganymede, both 2023). While the monsters in those films were more generalized manifestations of homophobia the protagonists had to contend with largely alone, Leviticus adds an intriguing wrinkle to the formula: romance, as both a target for and bulwark against a provincial town’s homophobic Christian dogmas. Chiarella’s central metaphor is blunt but potent, conveying how society weaponizes fear to suppress queer identities, and how in turn queer people internalize that fear so they’re forced to see the things they desire as dangerous. As human nature evinces, though, repressing desire only makes it stronger, and it’s the palpable intensity of desire as communicated between Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen that makes Leviticus work better as romance than horror. There are some genuinely unnerving moments — a bloody invasion of home (and mouth) is a standout — but Chiarella’s script is too underbaked, and the cinematography too slick, for these elements to really take hold. Character development is minimal, as is the elaboration of the town itself, which has plenty of forbidding rural-industrial atmosphere but little in the way of social logic. Everything is in the service of allegory; thankfully, Leviticus is so short the allegory doesn’t have time to be beaten into the ground, nor, regrettably, does it have time to be fully fleshed out.

Disclosure Day

DISCLOSURE DAY   ***

Steven Spielberg

2026

IDEA:  With the world on the brink of geopolitical catastrophe, a cybersecurity expert and a TV weatherwoman are involved in a plot to publicly reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life.

BLURB:  Disclosure Day starts as a paranoid conspiracy thriller and ends as an irony-free, self-reflexive paean to the power of movies to foster awe, empathy, and unity. Perhaps only a filmmaker as titanically venerable as Spielberg could get away with implicitly positing himself, and his work, as channels for the communication of a higher power (art), the same way Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild becomes an empathic vessel through which the extraterrestrials appeal to humankind’s better nature. Spielberg’s cinema has always been one rooted in primal pleasures and fears, connecting us to our most easily dazzled (and vulnerable) selves, and in Disclosure Day he makes a studio-set replica of Fairchild’s old family home serve as a madeleine-trigger to awaken her buried childhood memories. What could be a more perfect metaphor for Spielberg’s films, fastidiously constructed simulacra that bring us back to our own primal scenes? Spielberg and Koepp expand the metaphor as the film progresses, linking aliens and the stories told by moving images as figures of a collective faith that could, ideally, change human consciousness for the better. Disclosure Day’s earnest belief in this possibility — achieved via legacy media, no less — feels admittedly at odds with our increasingly atomized, factious society. Such guileless optimism is not exactly helped by being grafted to some very dubious plotting and character writing. But goofy and implausible are par for the invariably fun Spielberg genre course, as is schmaltzy humanism. Despite its messiness, Disclosure Day is still the expertly shot, edited, and acted work of a master, full of Kamiński’s dynamic, pirouetting camerawork and invigorated, especially, by Blunt’s alternately vivacious and tense, funny, polyglot performance as a possessed woman who persists even when she has no idea what she’s doing, or why. She’s all of us, beckoned alike by the terrifying unknowns of life and the transformative potential of stories to soothe them. If it’s hard to fully believe in the film’s message of hope, Spielberg seems to be entreating us: try.

Renoir

RENOIR   ***

Chie Hayakawa

2025

IDEA:  A young girl in 1987 Japan deals in her own ways with a terminally ill father and distant mother.

BLURB:  Played by wonderful young actress Yui Suzuki with a mix of stoic inscrutability and a sense of rash, unquenchable mischief, Fuki is not your typical movie kid. When she’s not sating her morbid curiosity by watching documentaries about the bombing of Japan or listening to gruesome news reports, she’s practicing her psychic abilities, dialing a telephone dating hotline, and neighing like a horse. We understand these as character idiosyncrasies, but more significantly as the effects of a culture in which emotions, not readily demonstrated, are rerouted through unique avenues of expression. Fuki is a product of Japanese attitudes of humility and self-restraint, and she processes her grief not by crying or talking but discreetly testing the bounds of her mortality, and morality. It’s a testament to Hayakawa and Suzuki that this girl can seem at once sweet and sociopathic; that she resists sentimentality and even full comprehension is a mark of the film’s authenticity in depicting a child’s complex engagement with the world. Renoir surrounds her with other characters who are similarly adrift in their private grieving, loneliness, or disaffection and turn to unusual or aberrant means in order to cope. Hayakawa’s style is graceful and empathic, with a fluidity that finds its correlation in billowing curtains and the motif of water. She ably communicates the melancholy of transience — but also the succor of connection — her characters struggle to verbalize.

Club Zero

CLUB ZERO   *

Jessica Hausner

2023

IDEA:  A nutrition teacher at a boarding school trains her pupils to obey a regimen of "conscious eating," which entails starvation as a means of achieving greater wellbeing.

BLURB:  It is a challenge to think of many other narrative feature films as immaculately designed yet with so very little to say as Club Zero, one in which pompously affected form is so risibly out of step with any perceivable function. No amount of icy-cool static long shots, slow zooms, persistent drumming on the soundtrack, or flamboyantly over-stylized sets and costumes can mask a painfully obvious and superficial allegory of religious-ideological indoctrination that culminates with a recreation of the Last Supper. Hausner is evidently going after jet-black absurdist social satire à la Yorgos Lanthimos, down to the deliberately stilted line readings, but she forgets to make her story compelling or any of her characters or situations convincing within the flimsy framework she’s established. Her world isn’t absurdist but merely nonsensical, so devoid of sociological or psychological nuance that it all but loses resonance with the reality it’s ostensibly critiquing. Where is this school located? Why do the students in Miss Novak’s class not interact with a single other student in the whole school, or have other classes? Why does literally everyone look like they’re dressed for the Met Gala? Hausner seems to care not a whit. She’s smugly fixated on her color-coordinated Architectural Digest mise en scène, lazy ironies (get it, “Silent Night” because people died on Christmas!), and pseudo-épater-la-bourgeoisie cheap shots that even an actor as talented as Mia Wasikowska is unable to give weight to. The most authentic part of Club Zero may be when Mathieu Demy, making physical what the audience has been doing mentally the whole time, rolls his eyes.