Eureka

EUREKA   ***1/2

Lisandro Alonso

2023

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

IDEA:  A shapeshifting, time-bending, magical realist exploration of Native American experience.

BLURB:  Eureka contains one of those legitimately astonishing form-breaking moments you see once in a while in the feature-length art film, a consciousness-torquing rupture that’s like the filmmaker pulling off a magic trick. Of course, it basically is; it’s the magic of a medium that can reorganize time, space, and the spectator’s perceptual economy. Lisandro Alonso no doubt exploits this ability in part because of the thrill of it (and it is thrilling to see!), but he also wants to get at something deeper about how film can unsettle the language of the status quo. His project, continuing explicitly from his previous film, Jauja, is to denude hegemonic Western narratives of their mythical heroic trappings. Eureka goes further than Jauja in that it actually centers indigenous subjects, although this isn’t apparent until the aforementioned schism, a masterful fakeout that yanks the film from a seemingly typical Western (albeit a grimly deglamorized one) into a contemporary realist drama layered with the traces of colonial violence. Over the rest of the film, which has in store one further and more metaphysical spatiotemporal shift, Alonso encourages us to find parallels across his different idioms. What is most prominent — from the severe argentine frames of the Viggo Mortensen-led Western to the frigid, durational tableaux of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to the lush but endangered Amazon — is a history of American indigeneity pockmarked by abuse and displacement. Alonso and his co-writers complicate “positive” representation by showing how these things don’t always come from the top down but are internalized and perpetuated within a community, as in the weary, ethically dubious law enforcement of a Lakota officer (Alaina Clifford) operating within a seriously compromised socioeconomic structure. Perversely, ironically titled, Eureka pointedly offers mostly lacunae and irresolution in its entrancing cosmic tapestry, but there is also startling, poignant clarity in the microscopic human detail it rescues from the gaps.

The Testament of Ann Lee

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE   ***

Mona Fastvold

2025

IDEA:  In the 18th century, Ann Lee begins the Shaker religious movement in England and journeys across the Atlantic to grow her community in America.

BLURB:  As a genre for the exuberant externalization of feeling, the musical is perfectly suited to the subject of ecstatic religious worship. The Testament of Ann Lee is not a traditional musical, but it wholly embraces the roles of singing and dancing as extra-verbal, extra-rational, and transcendent expressions of human experience. Here, that expression is tied to a religious sect primarily characterized by the musicality and somatic energy suggested by its name. The film’s Shakers writhe, stomp, prance, and circle each other in rapt communion, Daniel Blumberg’s sonorous hymnal song-score flowing through them like volts of electricity connecting heaven and earth. In its most potent moments, when Fastvold and Corbet cede the sometimes stodgy narrative to the primal joy of bodily movement, The Testament of Ann Lee captures the euphoria — phenomenological or spiritual — of giving oneself over to a sensation of collective reverence. And in this, the film locates a core irony: that Ann Lee started such a profoundly corporeal movement as a repudiation of sex and earthly desires. She is a mother who refuses the biological mandates of the role, and as such, Fastvold and Corbet render her a kind of queer feminist figure, defined not merely by an opposition to patriarchy but procreation and domesticity. Amanda Seyfried is so passionately, uninhibitedly keyed into her portrayal that she helps mitigate the feeling that this all seems pretty idealized, biographical nuances softened by admiration for Lee’s iconoclasm and tenacity. Maybe it’s worth valuing such an earnest celebration of faith, and one that doesn’t forget its ineluctable basis in a human body at once mortal and malleable.

Resurrection

RESURRECTION   ***

Bi Gan

2025

IDEA:  In a future in which most people have chosen to stop dreaming, a vigilante woman tries to eliminate a man who has refused, but becomes enthralled as she experiences his dreams.

BLURB:  Cinema as dreaming, falsity, truth, absence, presence, immortality, ephemerality, transgression, sacredness; the manifold characteristics and connotations of the medium reverberate throughout Bi Gan’s shapeshifting fantasia. Resurrection is one of those deliriously metacinematic movie-movies — think Leos Carax’s Holy Motors or Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room — that self-consciously salutes film by metabolizing its ontological properties and sedimented histories into hallucinatory form. In this case, it’s a journey through film idioms and genres, from silent German Expressionism to a buddy crime caper and a giallo-inflected supernatural romance, in which the underlying subtext is the mutability and uncontainable excess of the medium itself. Resurrection may be more linear in narrative than Bi’s first two Möbius-strip like films, but it still mostly speaks in an oneiric language of symbols and affects. Visual and thematic motifs proliferate across its chapters: fire, water, reflections, a suitcase; deception, illusion, lost parents and children; and the sensory modalities that allegedly correspond with each chapter but are really, as cinema would have it, exploited in combination throughout. Film intertexts abound, from the Lumière short L'Arroseur arrosé to Nosferatu and The Lady from Shanghai. It’s cinema unfolding as eternal return, until, in the arresting single-shot penultimate chapter, set on the last day of the 20th century, the medium morphs into something else, something more uncanny and terrifying. Is it the end, or just another transformation? Perhaps the key lies in the interstitial shots of melting candles, which burn down only to come back, prime to melt again, in yet another shape and time.

Marty Supreme

MARTY SUPREME   ***

Josh Safdie

2025

IDEA:  In 1952, a cocky young table-tennis player from New York gets into worsening straits on his journey to prove his greatness.

BLURB:  In the vein of the last two films Josh Safdie made with his brother Benny — and the gritty New Hollywood tradition that inspired them — Marty Supreme is a raucous, whirlwind portrait of a monomaniacal schemer who can’t help digging himself into deeper holes as he rushes headlong toward some elusive reward. Working on a broader historical and sociopolitical canvas than he has before, Safdie casts this character as an embodiment of American ideals in toxic overdrive, a hyperbolic national avatar of self-sufficiency, exceptionalism, and ruthless striving. Timothée Chalamet dives into this role with nervy, full-bodied gusto, darting through the film with an indefatigable flop-sweat energy that is equaled at every turn by the breakneck pacing, cacophonous soundtrack, and restless camerawork that captures a teeming ensemble of faces in extreme closeups. Among several subversions of sports-movie conventions, Safdie refuses to make the narcissistic, immoral Marty easy to root for. At the same time, he makes him impossible to despise, and this is why the character is compelling. If Marty signifies an unabashedly swollen American ego, he also represents working-class mettle and Jewish perseverance. An unusual vignette about a Holocaust survivor underlines a crucial theme: for a disadvantaged minority, survival takes on a different form. For Marty, that form is an overcompensating audacity revolving around an embryonic ping-pong ball that entangles him in Oedipal relationships and the dark heart of capitalist ethics. His perdurance is less a triumph of the American can-do spirit than the raw, existential will to keep on going.

Nouvelle Vague

NOUVELLE VAGUE   ***

Richard Linklater

2025

IDEA:  In 1959 Paris, young film critic Jean-Luc Godard decides to make his first feature film.

BLURB:  There are movies about filmmaking that depict the process as a lofty and labor-intensive undertaking, and there are those, such as Nouvelle Vague, in which one of the most seminal works of world cinema is jury-rigged in 20 half-days by a brash young director without a plan wrangling an exasperated cast and crew. Linklater could have glorified the making of Breathless, or dramatized its production as an unmitigated behind-the-scenes shambles, but instead he shows Godard as the kind of restive, inspired, but insouciant dilettante who drifted through his own first film, Slacker. Guillaume Marbeck is a dead ringer for JGL; permanently in his signature sunglasses and dragging on a cigarette, he has the director’s cadences, physicality, tireless intellect, and stubborn arrogance down to a T. Watching him orchestrate his vision, offhandedly and with an impish disdain for convention, one grasps Breathless as a lightning-in-a-bottle product of material contingency and impromptu, reckless invention. Even more than a chronicle of one particular director and film, however, Nouvelle Vague is an immaculate cinephilic recreation of a creatively fertile milieu, where Truffaut, Demy, Varda, Bresson, Melville, Rossellini, and sundry other luminaries brushed shoulders. David Chambille’s vintage lensing looks like it’s right out of the era, and the attention to antiquarian detail extends to the simulated optical subtitles and cue marks. Considering this aesthetic fidelity, it’s surprising Nouvelle Vague doesn’t mimic the radical formalism of Breathless or other New Wave films (not a single jump cut is used). Where the film does pay more direct homage is in the script’s bevy of quotations, which capture not only a distinctly Godardian intertextuality but create a playful, reverential dialogue between creators, from Leonardo to Godard to Linklater himself, who share a certain bug called art.

Hamnet

HAMNET   **

Chloé Zhao

2025

IDEA:  A family tragedy rends the domestic peace of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, spurring the former to write one of his greatest works.

BLURB:  Hamnet is based on a fundamentally shaky foundation: that the death of Shakespeare’s son directly inspired the creation of the Bard’s play “Hamlet.” This isn’t just speculative and schematic, but, in the hands of O’Farrell and Zhao, a premise that doesn’t translate to particularly compelling or illuminating drama. Worse, it’s ethically dubious, using a child’s death as a plot device for the unlocking of adult creativity and meaning, and as a presumptuous request for the audience’s tears. With leaden solemnity, O’Farrell and Zhao portend the boy’s death long before he’s born, making Hamnet a protracted waiting game. The overall aesthetic follows somber suit, with Łukasz Żal’s ill-fitting digital cinematography casting everything in a muted sheen to match the tonal monotony. Thank goodness for Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, who bring a pulse to Zhao’s airless filmmaking in performances that suggest the humanity of characters largely reduced to symbols of stoic maternal suffering and male-ego creative genius, respectively. Their emotional vulnerability occasionally cuts through and charges the film’s stodgy self-seriousness, whether it’s Buckley’s churning, memorably silent wail of grief or Mescal’s mix of melancholy and pride as he watches his play come to life from behind the stage. Yet their tears and gesticulations alone — nor a finale that strains effortfully for pathos — are enough to stir an audience that’s given insufficient feeling for their (and little Hamnet’s) inner lives.