Diciannove

DICIANNOVE   ***1/2

Giovanni Tortorici

2024

IDEA:  The misadventures of a young Italian literature student in the mid-2010s. 

BLURB:  There’s more than a little Holden Caulfield in Leonardo Gravina, the 19-year-old protagonist of Giovanni Tortorici’s brash debut feature. At once insolent and erudite, he rants impotently about the perceived phoniness of academic authority and buries his insecurities under an air of moral superiority. Manfredi Marini imbues Leonardo with mercurial posture and temperament: he’ll appear as a callow, even cherubic kid one moment then as a hedonistic malcontent or hungry intellectual the next, confounding expectations of what a Gen Z adolescent — or any person, really — might be like, privately and publicly, in the lifelong process of becoming. Leonardo’s recalcitrance also calls to mind the Angry Young Men of the British New Wave, and his erratic impulses are cogently reflected in a cinematic style bursting with the invention of that and other contemporaneous New Waves. Diciannove is exhilarating in its formal play, where truly anything seems to go; slow motion, freeze frames, crash zooms, exaggerated camera angles, split screens, intertitles, and animation are just some of the devices with which Tortorici floods the screen. He deforms classical film grammar so thoroughly you genuinely can’t predict what the next shot will look like; it could just as easily be a character stepping over the camera on a sunlit Tuscan street as a viral video of live chicks falling into an incinerator. Accusations of indulgence write themselves, and it’s true the syntactic chaos sometimes feels driven by nothing more than randomness. But if this decadent stylistic gallimaufry were to work anywhere, one of the places would surely be a portrait of a curious, carnal, distracted, befuddled, overzealous young adult. The ostentatiousness of Diciannove is ultimately indivisible from its pleasures and meanings alike, channeling a restive period of young adulthood with potent affective force.

Los Olvidados

LOS OLVIDADOS   ***1/2

Luis Buñuel

1950

IDEA:  Trouble comes to a youth street gang in Mexico City when the gang's leader escapes from jail.

BLURB:  In keeping with a cinematic tradition of social realism, Los Olvidados is brief, blunt, and unremittingly bleak; it has little of Buñuel’s typical surrealism but all of his ferocious indignation at the inequities of capitalist, Christian society. The messaging is so overt that the film — which opens with stock footage and a voiceover describing how modern cities conceal “malnourished children without hygiene” and are a “breeding ground for future delinquents” — could be called didactic. But Buñuel is never so simplistic. Within the almost curtly abbreviated runtime, he depicts an underclass that is both victim and victimizer, with no noble hero to guide or palliate our identification. The common currency in this world is violence, promulgated between adults and children who have naturalized it as a means of survival. Buñuel avoids creating a false moral center; everyone enacts some form of abuse, whether it’s a mother scorning her son, kids ravaging a blind street performer, or the blind street performer, in turn, molesting a girl and even killing a man. It’s a merciless, stark picture, visually situated between the studio-bound chiaroscuro of Hollywood crime films and the ground-level vérité of Italian neorealism. Buñuel does offer some surrealist touches, such as an eerie slow-motion dream sequence and the mischievous punctum of the young protagonist throwing a raw egg right at the camera. As in some of De Sica’s films, these moments counterbalance and set into relief the deprivations of the characters’ reality, soberingly pointing up the humanity that dies in the darkness.

Exit 8

EXIT 8   **

Genki Kawamura

2025

IDEA:  When he discovers that he's trapped in a subway tunnel that inexplicably goes around in circles, a soon-to-be father needs to learn a game to find the exit.

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

BLURB:  Exit 8 reaches the peak of its intriguing eeriness in the first 15 minutes, when first-person filmmaking unnervingly puts us in the shoes of a man who finds he’s trapped in an infinitely looping subway tunnel. Replicating the logic of the video game, the zigzagging spatial layout creates suspense about what surprise might appear behind each monotonously white-tiled corner, while also posing a challenge to the player/viewer’s attention, memory, and perhaps even sanity. Does this maddeningly inescapable space represent the endless grind of workaday life under capitalism? Is it a purgatorial trial meant to test the moral fiber and flexibility of people who have made questionable life decisions? Yes and yes, as Exit 8 makes explicit in a script that has very little faith in its audience to understand subtext. The considerable tension and mystery built up by Kawamura quickly evaporate as more characters are introduced and the story fully flattens into the clichéd, moralizing parable of reluctant fatherhood it teased from the first of a hundred crying baby sounds. When the mute, cherubic “Boy” appears, it becomes groaningly obvious where this is headed, and what the protagonist will have to do to redeem himself and secure his escape. To their credit, Kazunari Ninomiya invests gravitas in his paper-thin protagonist-avatar, and Keisuke Imamura’s camerawork nimbly navigates shifting character perspectives and vectors in a confined space. It’s too bad they’re stuck serving a script that never really advances past Exit 1. 

Cure

CURE   ***1/2

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

1997

IDEA:  A Tokyo police detective investigates a mysterious case of a man who hypnotizes his victims into murder.

BLURB:  The concept of virality in so much horror fiction involves not only the fear of infection and transmission, but the instability of boundaries. Even when the ostensible contaminant seems to come from without, as in Cure, what is being transmitted is usually a contagion that was there all along, traveling within social and psychological structures it exposes as far more porous than we’d like to believe. Mamiya, for all his seeming alterity and strange malevolence, does not so much introduce a virus as draw out what is already insidiously contagious within late-20th-century Japanese society. Kurosawa teases out these sociocultural toxins with as much disquieting, methodical rigor as Mamiya lures his victims, piecing together a chilling portrait of a citizenry bound by emotional repression, obedience, historical amnesia, and self-negation. What is passed between the characters in and across the hushed frames — typically long-take wide shots that assume a perspective of clinical omniscience — is a condition of susceptibility. The self is contingent, not only on the social systems it operates within but on day-to-day encounters, influences, and suggestions that accumulate over time. It’s in these quotidian moments Cure locates its truly unsettling existential horror: the implication that just about anything, whether a vexingly gnomic drifter or a certain sensory stimulus, can alter consciousness. Kurosawa does his own subliminal magic on the viewer’s consciousness through constant doubling, mesmeric motifs (trickling water, flashing lights), elliptical edits, and a subtle ambient soundscape that make us question our perception of events. After all, what is film but a kind of hypnosis?

Project Hail Mary

PROJECT HAIL MARY   ***

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

2026

IDEA:  Awaking aboard a spacecraft with no idea how he got there, a molecular biologist and science teacher finds that he's responsible for saving the universe.

BLURB:  A sturdy four-quadrant blockbuster, Project Hail Mary insists on delivering the crowd-pleasing goods: spectacle, laughs, tears, and a humanist message of cooperation and scientific optimism. It’s a boisterous galactic adventure characterized by the same mixture of sincerity and jocosity screenwriter Drew Goddard brought to The Martian, and given added spark by the fleet-footed pop style of Lord and Miller. This is a jokey movie, to a fault — the filmmakers can’t seem to resist a well-placed quip, snarky cutaway, or even a corny T-shirt — but with a star as magnetic as Ryan Gosling at the center, it largely works. Playing the complete opposite of his taciturn Neil Armstrong in his greatest space movie, First Man, Gosling makes Dr. Ryland Grace into a garrulous, fun-loving goofball whose scientific acumen is belied by his fumbling dorkiness. The actor is equally agile with a bewildered reaction or sheepish retort as he is with the role’s ample physical comedy, which has him flopping face-down and spinning clumsily in zero G like Chaplin’s Tramp if he had been sent to space. Gosling’s Grace also shares with the Tramp a deep vein of sentimentality, particularly in his life-affirming friendship with his alien counterpart, Rocky. The good-natured simplicity of this friendship is the core of Project Hail Mary, and while the film perhaps makes the friendship too simple, ironing out the pair’s cultural differences in favor of buddy-comedy hijinks and trite universalisms, it’s a relationship that registers with primal directness: we need each other, and to do things for each other. Like The Martian, the film unashamedly espouses such earnest, even naive humanism, communicating it with enough heart, panache, and craft to feel both earned and rather moving.

The Bride!

THE BRIDE!   ***

Maggie Gyllenhaal

2026

IDEA:  In 1930s Chicago, a murdered gangster's moll is resurrected to serve as a companion to Frankenstein's monster.

BLURB:  That exclamation point is no mere stylization; The Bride! is an emphatic, immodest, unbridled shout of a film, a rowdy cinephilic pastiche that isn’t afraid to get goofy. This means a delectably unhinged Jessie Buckley swerving from brassy Chicago flapper girl to her best, burlesque Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich; Jake Gyllenhaal as a prim Fred Astaire-type Hollywood star; randomly, Penélope Cruz as a chain-smoking incipient detective named Myrna Malloy; and, but of course, a gaudy ball reprise of Young Frankenstein’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Maggie Gyllenhaal is as evidently drunk on movies as she is on a cathartic (if simplistic) brand of girlboss feminism, and her film’s unabashed embrace of camp is invigorating in a contemporary Hollywood so allergic to madcap fun. The Bride! also has a clear and mostly satisfying ideological point, which is to restore agency and bite to women whose representations have largely been dictated, and flattened, by men. By making Mary Shelley an actual character in her story, and one who speaks through her creation, the Bride, Gyllenhaal pays tribute to a fellow female auteur and shows how women creators through time can communicate with and build on each other’s legacies. Does everything work here? No; the feminist revolution sparked by the Bride feels like a dropped thread, and the mob/detective stuff is pretty sketchy, despite a scene-stealing performance from a ruthless Zlatko Burić. But The Bride! has style and verve to spare, as well as dozens of literal tongues figuratively planted firmly in cheek.