Roma

ROMA   ***1/2

Alfonso Cuarón

2018

IDEA:  In 1970 Mexico City, a domestic worker balances her own personal struggles with those of the increasingly fraught family she cares for.

BLURB:  Cinematic excess – the chaotic, formless flow of existence that can never be contained within the scope of the frame – is a concept Alfonso Cuarón intimately understands. In Roma, the filmmaker frequently packs his wide, long panning shots with abundant activity, every movement from the center of the image to its ever-expanding margins suggesting the breadth of a world his film can inevitably capture only a fragment of. This knowingly circumscribed perspective becomes the organizing principle of Roma, a film that subtly and rigorously modulates point-of-view so that we feel as if we’re simultaneously seeing a big picture (Mexico City social and political life in the 1970s) and an interior, inherently limited one (the life of a live-in domestic worker), privy to the former only to the degree that the latter can observe it. Literally from the first image, Cuarón’s visuals are crafted to evoke this bifocal perspective: acutely rooted in the subjectivity of Cleo, the housekeeper, while made constantly aware of the societal fabric around her, Cuarón’s panoramic shots by turns center Cleo and push her into non-hierarchical tableaux, favoring a Bazinian democracy of vision that refuses to privilege individual subjects through close-ups. This aesthetic ideology is not only in keeping with the neorealist films that are Roma’s progenitors, but is an elegantly logical approach to representing Cleo’s liminal social-domestic position. If Cuarón sometimes holds us at a remove in Roma – and the film can often be rather placidly remote, to a fault – it makes a certain sense. This is a portrait of a place that situates us on its material and spiritual boundaries, making us wonder about the multitude of lives we’ll never know, or only get to know through the cinema.

The Favourite

THE FAVOURITE   ***

Yorgos Lanthimos

2018

IDEA:  The power balance in the court of Queen Anne is destabilized when a fallen noblewoman sets her sights on winning the queen's favor at all costs.

BLURB:  In the relatively narrow but rich canon of caustic, subversive costume dramas, The Favourite enters as a satisfying – if hardly groundbreaking – addition. Like its forebears, most notably The Draughtsman’s Contract, Lanthimos’s film is interested in the absurdity and savagery contained within the decorous walls of the noble elite, its pleasures coming from how impishly it scrapes away the lacquer of politeness that typically coats media representations of royal history. The opulence of Queen Anne’s palace is certainly a spectacle, but it would mean nothing to Lanthimos if it wasn’t also the marker of an excess as monstrous as the power plays and debauched rituals taking place amongst it. The Favourite doesn’t have to do much digging to find the volatility, malaise, and perversity festering in such posh quarters. They are amply apparent in Anne’s infirm body and hair-trigger rages, so volcanically and viscerally enacted by Olivia Colman; in her advisor Lady Sarah’s incorrigible bellicosity, wielded ruthlessly; in the bizarre japes of the parliament; and certainly in the actions of the usurper, Abigail, whose monomaniacal deceits know no bounds. While the dysfunction and skullduggery are predictably, nastily delightful, the film’s real achievement is in how it draws out pathos from the interpersonal warfare. Even when his merciless gaze threatens to level the characters into grotesque caricatures (not helped by the gratuitous and arbitrary-feeling fish-eye lenses), Lanthimos uses the triangulated relationship between Anne, Sarah, and Abigail to uncover complex layers of vulnerability and desire simmering behind the crown, ready to be exploited. If not exactly novel as bawdy historical satire, The Favourite nonetheless haunts as a tragicomic illustration of how easily our humanity is compromised when mechanisms of power overwhelm good sense.

One from the Heart

ONE FROM THE HEART   **

Francis Ford Coppola

1982

IDEA:  A couple rethinks their relationship as they embark on simultaneous affairs with more seemingly ideal partners.

BLURB:  One from the Heart is a curious creation: an extravagant spectacle boasting all the aesthetic signifiers of a classical Hollywood musical but deprived of the attendant spirit and charm. In the elaborate, hyper-stylized artifice of its studio-simulacrum Las Vegas, and in the paper-thin romantic narrative that weaves indifferently through it, the film almost seems to perversely reject the titular “heart” foundational to the genre, so preoccupied is it with bombastic mise-en-scène. Coppola distends the pageantry – a lavish parade of neon signage, superimpositions, color-coded stage lighting, and lap dissolves – to such an exaggerated, even distancing degree one wonders if he is in fact shooting for ironic Sirkian critique rather than unfettered homage. The idea is certainly reinforced by the Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle soundtrack, which jazzily but listlessly fills in for the voices of the nonmusical protagonists, as well as by the aforementioned romance that feels as ersatz as the sets. But if One from the Heart really is supposed to be some kind of auto-critical pastiche, a husk of seductive formalism exposing the empty center of Hollywood fantasy, it forgot to tell its director. In the face of such all-devouring visual excess, Coppola insists on the sentimental pull of his lovers even though their tepid chemistry and flat characterizations undermine our engagement. There is little passion in their discord or inevitable reconciliation, and so they come to seem like just more parts to move around in this giant mechanical contraption. Neither a convincing genre reimagining or tribute, One from the Heart ends up an immaculately constructed, mostly inert bauble.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS   **1/2

Joel and Ethan Coen

2018

IDEA:  An anthology of six mordant tales about the old American west.

BLURB:  Torn from the pages of myth but drained of heroism, glory, and most metrics of justice, the Wild West depicted in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a vast province of amoral chaos and merciless death. It plays host to killers, cowards, mountebanks, and miscreants, all roaming a boundless, seemingly godless Earth, subject to the caprices of the mortal plane. When decency does threaten to find purchase, it becomes almost inevitably snuffed out. Characteristically mischievous and as blithely morose as ever, the Coens exploit this pitiless American frontier for perhaps their most acrid expression yet of an essentially indifferent universe. Their six self-contained tales, cleverly positioned as chapters in an old storybook, constantly betray a worldview vacillating between the nihilistic and the absurd, although the tenor of most chapters leans closest to the former, as the Coens convey how tenuous and expendable life was in the old west while positing little consistent rhyme or reason for the fates that befall their characters. Actions may not be meaningless, but they certainly don’t guarantee anything as psychopathic gunslingers ascend to the heavens and innocent settlers lay in the dirt with bullets in their heads. Everyone’s going to the same place, just as surely as that book will be closed by film’s end. While the Coens take evident delight in many of the ways they get there, there is a lack of visual imagination and thematic texture on display that is disappointing coming from such ingenious filmmakers. The stories tend to strike the same contrapuntal notes of frivolity and despair with little variation, and while the sense of redundancy is apt for a film concerned with the cycles of human folly, it creates a fairly leaden viewing experience. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which also can’t find a way to accommodate a narrative about anyone who isn’t white, ultimately remains somewhat stuck in the cobwebs of the myths it riffs on as well as on ideas the Coens have explored to greater depth in the past.

Boy Erased

BOY ERASED   ***

Joel Edgerton

2018

IDEA:  A young man in conservative Christian Arkansas is sent to a conversion therapy camp when he is outed to his parents.

BLURB:  Boy Erased is a social advocacy film that appeals unabashedly to the emotions, not from a place of calculated tear-wringing but from an instinctual alliance with its LGBT subjects. There is nothing new about a film highlighting injustice by stoking the audience’s anger and empathy, but Boy Erased subtly diverges from many in how non-didactically it does this, assuming already the spectator’s knowledge of LGBT persecution so that it can train its attention on a wider fabric of oppressive social and religious conditioning. Indeed, Edgerton is interested in more than simply exposing the inhumane, pernicious nature of conversion therapy programs. Though the scenes inside the institution are appropriately grueling and maddening, what stand out just as much are the conversations and gestures of the ostensibly virtuous Christian parents played by Kidman and Crowe, which reveal the ingrained beliefs that invariably and often unconsciously dictate harmful actions. Edgerton, whose own performance deftly avoids the cartoonish villainy that might have predictably attended his noxious character in another director/actor’s hands, does not demonize these parents, or Christianity. He understands a milieu and a mindset that extend far beyond them, and recognizes with sensitivity the strides that must be taken in order to ameliorate their entrenched ideologies. And in the powerful performances of Kidman and Crowe, and certainly of Lucas Hedges, he locates the personal pain, longing, and strife that so much dogma has engendered. Boy Erased is fully, cathartically on Jared’s side, but it is so poignant because it maintains hope that those who demanded he change might realize it is themselves who must do so instead.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?   ***1/2

Marielle Heller

2018

IDEA:  The true story of biographer Lee Israel, who turned to forging letters from prominent writers when her career was in the ruts.

BLURB:  Melissa McCarthy’s Lee Israel is something of an accidental countercultural hero. Everything that excludes her from acceptance by the literary establishment – her abrasiveness, her femaleness, her iconoclasm – become in McCarthy’s portrayal the markers of a personality defiantly inassimilable to its market-driven standards. She exposes the meretriciousness of a system that values brand above content; she punctures the hypocrisies of publishers and agents who purport to honor authentic voices but only do so on their rigid institutional terms, shunning ones like hers that don’t conform to commercial expectations. But just as Israel’s foray into forging authors’ letters starts as an economic necessity, this undermining of literary pretenses is not a purposeful salvo but a byproduct of how she navigates a tenuous professional position, which the film understands as profoundly bound up in her personal struggles. Without defending the immorality and deceitfulness that were the results of this, Can You Ever Forgive Me? displays a poignant admiration for Israel and her complicated outsider status. The depth of Holofcener and Whitty’s script is such that she transcends roles of victim and felon. While she might be antagonized by her industry, she also does her own part in pushing people away through her uncompromising and rancorous demeanor. In a manner as delicate as Israel is gruff, Heller reveals the vulnerabilities and insecurities that are defensively encased by the author’s combative resolve. Between moments of splenetic rage, McCarthy embodies the contradictions of a woman seeking recognition but also deeply afraid of it, in need of approval but also wary of what that would mean, a woman who could ironically only realize her own voice by assuming others’. As the tale of an unlikely, unlawful route to self-actualization, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a perversely inspiring coming-out story, an example of how an individual’s renegade ingenuity, however disreputable, permitted her to become the person the system never allowed her to be.

First Man

FIRST MAN   ****

Damien Chazelle

2018

IDEA:  An account of the years in Neil Armstrong's life leading up to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

BLURB:  Gratifyingly resisting any impulse to simply relay historical information or lionize a famous public figure, First Man commits itself to invoking a cosmos of sensations – frightening, exhilarating, overwhelming – with Neil Armstrong as an embodied conduit. Chazelle channels his subjective, sensory experience(s) through a magisterial command of the medium’s formal properties, placing us inside clamorous cockpits, bombinating test vehicles, and even astronaut helmets, manipulating visual and acoustic space to thrillingly immersive perceptual effect. The film’s visceral emphasis on embodied experience is as much a self-justified experimental approach to this subject as it is a thematization of the story’s preoccupation with life, death, and the phenomenal. Subverting nationalist-historical narratives as well as aesthetic expectations, Chazelle foregrounds the unwieldy and precarious materiality of spacecraft to convey the danger, even folly, of interstellar flight. Propagandistic discourse is stripped away in favor of a representation of the space program as suicide mission, as a possibly preposterous boondoggle whose human risks outstrip its potential for scientific gain. Contextualized alongside the Vietnam War, First Man measures the defensibility of putting lives in jeopardy for questionable ends, and Chazelle takes every opportunity to conjure the magnitude and physical weight of this peril through rattling equipment, groaning metal, and the tension of bodies strapped inside the apparatuses constituted by them. 

Rocked by the tragedies that surround him, a series of shocks catalyzed by the loss of his daughter, and unable to easily communicate emotion, Gosling’s Armstrong is an unlikely biopic hero. For most of the film he is taciturn, sullen, even inscrutable; Singer’s script wisely homes in on his internal struggles, framing his missions through the unspeakably private rather than the mass-mediated, and the actor responds with a portrayal of anxious, guarded, but resolute obsession. Chazelle and Singer suggest that his quest to walk on the moon was as much motivated by any professional pride in country as it was by the desire to literally defy limits, to tempt and transcend death, to accomplish the impossible. To the degree any film reasonably could, First Man approximates the transgressive, masochistic thrill of this desire made historically manifest, allowing us to feel the dread and the excitement of flying so close to the void.

Border

This review was originally published on Cine-File.

BORDER   ***1/2

Ali Abbasi

2018

IDEA:  A border guard with a gift for smelling people's emotions comes to learn the truth about herself when she meets a strangely similar man. 

Classic stories from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame to Frankenstein have cast physically anomalous outsiders as both mirrors of and foils to the ills of mankind, serving as metaphors for a society hostile to difference. Without giving too much away, Ali Abbasi’s folkloric-realist Border joins their ranks while shrewdly subverting the cultural codes inscribed in such narratives, conceptualizing difference outside prevailing dualisms. 

The film follows Tina, a lonely Swedish border guard who, from the start, is clearly unlike anyone else. Not only does her visage set her apart – her heavy, protruding brow and pachydermic skin drawing curious stares – but so too does her seemingly supernatural ability to smell people’s guilt and fear, a trait the authorities exploit to find contraband. Near her home nestled in the woods, she appears to commune with foxes and moose, and indeed, her own behavior often resembles that of an animal, most notably in the way her upper lip flares when she’s in proximity of a guilty passenger. But is Tina really that sui generis? When she encounters someone entering the country who looks just like her, she begins to question her true nature as the two embark on a relationship that brings enlightenment and terror. 

Abbasi gradually parcels out information about Tina and this analogous partner, rendering their multiple idiosyncrasies with fascination but also affection. The film may be grounded in Scandinavian folklore, but its inflections of social realism, horror, and discourses around queerness unsettle it from generic categories, allowing it to engage, most excitingly and even radically, with the politics of anti-humanism. Lest this all get too esoteric, Eva Melander’s extraordinary performance as Tina anchors the film to a sense of lived experience. Behind the impressive prosthetics, the actress powerfully conveys the arc of a woman shambling from the shadows of diffidence and internalized hatred to self-actualization. Border is filled with a surfeit of imagery earthly and uncanny, but Melander’s accented face supplies it with its most arresting moments: the plays of anxiety, anger, and shame that capture a life kept on the sidelines of one society, and the blossoming confidence of one emerging tentatively into the center of another. 

El Angel

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

EL ANGEL   ***

Luis Ortega

2018

IDEA:  An account of 19-year-old Argentine murderer and thief Carlos Puch, who was dubbed "The Angel" due to his cherubic looks.

BLURB:  When confronted with evil, it is our instinct to rationalize it, to attempt to ascribe to the perpetrator some motivation that will explain away unconscionable actions. Film and other media have long represented real-life criminals with this aim, mixing factual details with speculation to draw conclusions about what made them tick. In El Angel, notorious Argentine serial killer and thief Carlos Puch compellingly defies such diagnostics – as played by Lorenzo Ferro, the baby-faced murderer is a self-mythologizing enigma who simply believes himself to be above law and morality. Without pointing to anything concrete or contriving answers, Ortega situates Puch’s fluid sexual identity and vaguely anti-capitalist sentiments within a 1970s Argentina that provides intriguing context for his behavior. The pointedly marginalized presence of the darker-skinned underclass, for instance, adumbrates the racial and economic inequity from which he’s been notably cocooned, while the escalating police visibility indexes the hegemony of the country’s military junta. Meanwhile, pervasive homophobia encircles Puch and his lover/accomplice, suggesting the degree to which societal intolerance has forced him to repress his sexuality. He even implicitly aligns himself with old pseudoscience equating homosexuality with an essential deviance, declaring himself a “born thief,” and thus an other who’s predisposed to flouting the rules. But his ideology is incoherent, and Ortega’s portrait remains necessarily elusive. It combines a romanticized pop-aesthetic vision of violent rogueness with a countervailing sense of the bleak social reality Puch blocks out, creating a dissonance that resists resolution. El Angel, slick and digestible though it is, leaves us with a terrifying inexplicability: a kid with no sense of proportion or consequence, divorced from the weight of the world, stranded from logic.

Family First

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

FAMILY FIRST   **

Sophie Dupuis

2018

IDEA:  The allegiances of a crime family begin to unravel when JP, the eldest son, starts to have compunctions about his work, while his younger brother inversely becomes more reckless and remorseless. 

BLURB:  Théodore Pellerin’s performance in Family First is the kind of floridly affected overacting that threatens to tear right through a film, making the audience wonder how much of the style is intentional and how much of it is an actor grossly overshooting, completely out of sync with the movie they’re in. Pellerin’s Vincent is introduced as the lanky, rambunctious loose canon to his fuller and more reserved criminal brother, so that sense of incongruity at least primes us for the film’s central family conflict. Needling and ostentatious, not to mention so childishly volatile and heedless he randomly head-butts strangers at parties, Vince is a mephitic nuisance the family has grown increasingly and conspicuously wary of. Played by Pellerin with a permanent joker’s grin, musical theater cadences, and wild gesticulations, one is as apt to question the character’s mental wellness as they are the actor’s method and aims. As it turns out, this unhinged performance does gradually make sense to the film’s narrative, the idea becoming clear by at least the second time Vince snuggles up in bed with his mother that this is Pellerin’s interpretation of an emotionally stunted ne’er-do-well, desperately clung to the teat of the crime family unit that has nurtured him since infancy and maniacally unwilling to let it go. In a way, then, the actor achieves a kind of extra-textual, puncturing effect that adds to the characterization: Vincent is an unruly agitator who is both a threat inside the narrative and to it, an excess neither the family nor the fiction can contain. Pellerin is really the only thing the otherwise stodgily directed Family First has going for it, and his histrionics – however relatively befuddling, irritating, or fascinating they are to a given viewer – can only take it so far.

Happy as Lazzaro

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

HAPPY AS LAZZARO   ***

Alice Rohrwacher

2018

IDEA:  Lazzaro, a guileless and obedient lumpenproletariat, experiences the ravages of Italian society. 

BLURB:  Ambitious and striking if perhaps a bit hemmed in by its reliance on archetypes, Happy as Lazzaro synthesizes a mélange of literary and cinematic traditions into something both modern and eternal. It begins as a kind of neorealist pastoral, dominated by hardscrabble scenes of agrarian life sensuous and urgent in their tactile 16mm form. Then, with the introduction of an imperious Marquise and her cosmopolitan clan, it gradually becomes torqued by magical realism and religious allegory, before moving north to Milan for a hefty dose of globalist 21^st-century Marxist critique. Threading through all of this is Lazzaro, the prototypical fool, whose unspoiled decency and permanent guilelessness Rohrwacher renders as supernatural traits. In her masterstroke, she makes Lazzaro literally unchanging, not only in character but in appearance, so that even as unquantifiable stretches of time and space pass and the other characters age, he remains the same blissfully unaware sprite. Like other works dealing in anachronism and temporal ambiguity, Happy as Lazzaro employs its immortal titular character to comment on an essentially timeless condition: in this case, the existence of capitalist exploitation. Even though he is the only one who remains fixed in time, the stasis of Lazzaro functions as a mirror to the society he navigates, whose geographical and technological progression masks a calcified socioeconomic hierarchy. The poor, exploited labor of the film’s rural setting are still poor and disenfranchised in its urban one, and the class divisions outlined in its first half are only entrenched in its second. Rohrwacher places this critique in the realm of fable, which sometimes lends it a heavy-handed, schematic feeling but also creates possibilities for thinking about our fraught present on more discursively expanded terms.

Mario

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

MARIO   **1/2

Marcel Gisler

2018

IDEA:  When Mario falls in love with the new recruit on his football team, censure from within and outside the league threatens both men's chances of going pro.


BLURB:  It’s an axiom of media both LGBT-focused and otherwise that the locker room, and the world of athletics it supports, are social domains rippling with homoerotic undercurrents. Men change, bathe, and perform a variety of physical activities within close proximity, fostering a communal intimacy based on often unconscious body-first relations. For gay folks, this dynamic is compounded by a sexual component that is typically disavowed and shunned by the heteronormative sports community to which they belong, leading to tensions between the individual and the team, between transparency and concealment, that can be tricky if not impossible to negotiate. Mario takes off from this point, telling a story of two footballers whose romance jeopardizes their careers. The dilemma becomes discomfitingly clear, fast, forcing the men to decide what matters to them more: going pro or living an open and honest life. Despite the smartly understated, committed performances from Hubacher and Altaras and a keen sense of personal and professional stakes, the film does little unique with this scenario, taking the prosaic route with material that certainly has potential for a more evocative telling. While there is something to be said of a relationship drama that so genuinely feels for both of its participants, that rather than taking sides demonstrates equal sensitivity to their respective choices, Mario doesn’t quite generate the same passion for its lovers as they show for each other.

Woman at War

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

WOMAN AT WAR   ***

Benedikt Erlingsson

2018

IDEA:  A radical environmental activist evades the Icelandic government as she prepares to adopt a young Ukrainian girl.

BLURB:  In a droll, off-kilter register hovering between the whimsical and the dryly ominous, Woman at War addresses the catastrophic course of climate change and the very real probability that there is no longer anything we can do to stop it. It’s heavy stuff for a film featuring running onscreen musical accompaniment from an oom-pah band, and although Erlingsson is sometimes tempted toward glibness by his idiosyncratic narrative conceits, the director manages to strike a consistently irreverent tone without compromising the story’s pertinent real-world implications. Certainly helping in this matter is actress Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, who pulls double-duty as strong-willed twin sisters. Her eco-terrorist Halla, the lead of the two, is a delightfully implacable force who acts as the avatar for the film’s activist ethos. Whether discussing plans for adoption or breathlessly ducking authorities in chases across the countryside, the actress imbues the character with a steely, stubborn tenacity tied to a refusal to let Iceland, and Mother Earth, be despoiled. The central irony that she is fighting for the environment by attacking the industry of Iceland, a tiny country and one of the greenest to boot, is one of Woman at War’s darkly tacit jokes, and it is in this irony that the film resonates as both a rallying cry for intrepid activism and an acknowledgment of improbable odds. Like anyone else, Halla wants to keep the planet alive, but how much of an impact can one Icelandic woman make? The picture Erlingsson paints, complemented by an inept, technocratic, xenophobic government, is pretty grim, but Halla’s vivid journey – and that unassailable oom-pah band – suggest some kind of faint glow in the Reykjavik darkness.

Jumpman

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

JUMPMAN   ***

Ivan I. Tverdovsky

2018

IDEA:  Reacquainted with his mother sixteen years after she left him in an orphanage's baby box, Denis, who can feel no physical pain, is exploited for an illegal scheme: he jumps in front of moving cars driven by wealthy people, and a rigged jury collects their money.

BLURB:  Jumpman’s most recurring, indelible image – of its half-naked protagonist, Denis, bound by a hose two of his peers pull taut around him – provides a fittingly concise metaphor in a film that doesn’t waste any time getting to and bluntly sticking its point. It’s an image of palpable, suffocating constriction that encapsulates Denis’ exploitation by a corrupt system, but since Denis’s analgesia prevents him from feeling pain, it’s also one that reveals a compulsory numbness born from a cruel, uncaring social order. One can easily understand how the Russia of Jumpman would breed such acedia: Tverdovsky flatly, pungently illustrates a government and a legal structure indifferent to justice, run by a rapacious power elite that pulls all the strings to get its way. The depiction is deliberately unsubtle, the corruption as flagrant to the spectator as it is to the film’s victimized characters, whose cries of innocence during ritual sham trials are impassively brushed over by Tverdovsky’s unblinking, circling camera gaze. Meanwhile, Denis grows from uncritical accomplice to a young adult with scruples, even if he’s been hardened to the point of ossification by the world that has raised him. Desensitization is both a precondition and a systemic symptom of living in a callous, morally bankrupt society, Jumpman says, and while the slim framework it hangs this thesis on can sometimes lack nuance, its simplicity and terseness are also what help deliver its indictment with damning clarity.

We the Animals

WE THE ANIMALS   ***1/2

Jeremiah Zagar

2018

IDEA:  Jonah, the youngest of three brothers in a rural New York household, struggles with his identity amidst a tumultuous family life. 


BLURB:  We the Animals is a film about nascent otherness that is acutely rooted in the point-of-view of its young protagonist. Enmeshing hazy magic-hour imagery with animated interludes, it lyrically and achingly expresses Jonah’s flowering understanding of his queerness, offering an interior account of his desires and anxieties as they emerge from and come to bear on his incipient identity. Many films can be called “dreamlike,” but the descriptor is especially apt for We the Animals: its visualizations of Jonah’s fantasies, whether closer to waking life or reverie, are semi-surreal representations that read as authentically shaped by experience and unconscious feelings, percolating with eroticism, shame, euphoria, and fear that can’t be easily delineated. This mercurial affective flow is especially potent when associated with the sweetly doleful face of Evan Rosado. The young actor, typically shot in extreme close-ups that linger on his yearning blue eyes, creates a tender and lived-in anchor around which the film’s often violent, fulminating drama churns, attuning us to his vulnerable status as he tries to make sense of the storms both within and outside of him. In his curious but bashful gaze we see the world as he does: alluring, confusing, hostile, and potentially magical. And in his dreams, the private refuge of his mind with which we’re allowed this brief, stirring communion, we can imagine with him the possibility of freedom.

The Naked Island

THE NAKED ISLAND   ***1/2

Kaneto Shindo

1960

IDEA:  A peasant family living on a secluded island goes about its daily routines, laboring without the modern amenities available to those across the ocean.

BLURB:  On a primordial ur-island isolated from yet nestled in the archipelago of a modernizing 20^th-century Japan, the nameless protagonists of The Naked Island subsist, even as the tide of historical change and the elements themselves seem to render the conditions of their existence increasingly untenable. Yet they carry on, shouldering buckets of water up a cragged mountainside to irrigate their meager crops in a ritual that recalls the dignity-in-the-face-of-futility of Sisyphus. Shindo locates in their repetitive, enervating agricultural routine such a mythic allegory: a timeless fable of human labor, of enduring through life’s ineluctable struggles with determination and resilience despite the lack of discernible purpose or gain. The film’s effulgent images, which set the protagonists against boundless vistas of land and water, suggest a landscape as immortal as the human drama taking place within it. The Naked Island also, unavoidably, articulates a specific nationalist context, registering the losses and transformations of postwar Japan and offering a vision of social reality situated somewhere between propaganda and elegy. While it might be fair to wince at its depiction of agrarian existence as a reactionary lament for a more honorable primitive past, Shindo coarsens his romanticism with a palpable feel for the pain that permeated, and certainly continued to permeate in 1960, many aspects of Japanese life. The film is gorgeous, but it is also tough, disciplined, and often exhausting – a paean to human toil and tenacity that understands both as prerequisites for survival.

Mother and Son

MOTHER AND SON   ***

Aleksandr Sokurov

1997

IDEA:  In a purgatorial countryside, a son carries his mother through her last corporeal hours.

BLURB:  If it’s possible to be both eternal and evanescent, close to the surface and remote, to convey a sense of being present and irrecoverably missing, then Mother and Son manages it. This seemingly paradoxical condition is, of course, at the core of cinema, the ultimate phantom art, and Sokurov conjures something of that distilled essence in his film’s ghostly wash of images. Alternately and sometimes all at once warped, smudged, faded, and stained, the tableaux that make up Mother and Son look like old photographic artifacts exhumed from some otherworldly bog, set in motion so tentative it’s hard to say if it’s stasis or movement that is being disrupted. Regardless of one’s interpretation or iconic recognition of this aesthetic, the myriad optical effects foreground the mutability of the filmic image and make us conscious of our mediated perception. Because mortality is a theme of the film, the images take on especially spectral qualities: they appear, embalmed, from some unknown past time and space, their existential contents simultaneously frozen and temporarily reanimated within the brief 72 minutes of the film’s runtime. Mother and Son’s brevity preempts any claims of plodding self-seriousness, which a longer film could have easily invited. It’s also what reinforces its austere, porous beauty, flickering like a candle in a cinematic gloaming.

BlacKkKlansman

BLACKKKLANSMAN   **1/2

Spike Lee

2018

IDEA:  Ron Stallworth, the first black member of the Colorado Springs police force, and Flip Zimmerman, a Jewish officer, infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

BLURB:  The opening of BlacKkKlansman, a direct-address white supremacist lecture intercut with footage from Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation, packs a wallop. It instantly establishes Lee’s film as a rebuke of and corrective to a history of racist popular American cinema, auguring an indignant work of agitprop that will make no bones about condemning the country’s virulent systemic racism. Lee’s outrageous true-story subject matter offers an incendiary way into targeting the white nationalist ideology that has become increasingly mainstreamed in the nation’s political discourse. So why is BlacKkKlansman such a missed opportunity? Why does Lee, outside of some characteristically fiery, rhetorically blunt montage, seem so content pandering to his audience instead of shaking them up? There is little about his film that should be illuminating to anyone not immured in the myth of a post-racial America. There is equally little that should inspire any new thought. What are we to do with endless scenes wringing humor and horror from the KKK’s buffoonish moral degeneracy? Lee redundantly airs their epithet-laden rhetoric and mostly has us pat ourselves on the back for recognizing its insanity, a lazy tactic that takes up too much of the film’s bloated runtime. BlacKkKlansman is a vital work by virtue of its context, but what really should have been challenging, excoriating subversion settles for the fleetingly cathartic.

Eighth Grade

EIGHTH GRADE   ***1/2

Bo Burnham

2018

IDEA:  The diffident Kayla Day struggles to find confidence and a sense of belonging during the final week of eighth grade.

BLURB:  In 90 minutes of screen time and one condensed week in the life of a 14-year-old, Eighth Grade distills the amorphousness and confusion of early adolescent identity. Kayla Day, played by Elsie Fisher with impressively prodigious inelegance, navigates this murky territory the only way she knows how: through social media. Her vlogs provide her a site through which she can present a self-image she is unable to exhibit in person. Despite its putative social function, Burnham crucially understands these vlogs as being primarily in service of the creator, a form of ego-projection that allows Kayla to identify with a version of herself that is more coherent, and aspirational, than the one she fumbles to realize in real life. Eighth Grade gets the combination of effacement and visibility that characterizes such media use, and more generally the embarrassments that come with negotiating an inchoate self-concept, online or otherwise. But what ultimately makes the film so resonant is the eternal applicability of the feelings it portrays. For Burnham, eighth grade is not so much a discrete chapter of perishable experience as a microcosm of existential uncertainties that resurface throughout life. The familiar angsty waves of apprehension may find their most concentrated expression in the pubescent Kayla, but they cannot be solely attributed to a “phase.” Beyond the demo and idiom it so empathetically renders, Eighth Grade is wisest in its recognition of life as a continual process of transition, and change as the often ungainly necessity of our ongoing maturation.

Black Girl

BLACK GIRL   ****

Ousmane Sembène

1966

IDEA:  A Senegalese woman emigrates to France thinking she will continue her role as caretaker for her employers' children, but when she gets there she is increasingly stripped of her freedom as their indentured domestic servant.

BLURB:  Black Girl starkly registers the abuses of European colonialism through the eyes of a Senegalese woman trapped in its systems of racial, sexual, and economic oppression. Conceptually, this narrowed focus on the experiences of a colonial subject is itself a radical and revolutionary act, a centering of African identity and personhood that affords privileged status to the colonized at the necessary diminution of the colonizers. By allowing Diouana’s thoughts and actions to narrate the film, Sembène foregrounds the voice and presence of a woman who is expected to be submissive and unseen, providing a harrowingly internal and profoundly empathetic account of her exploited humanity. He and the magnificent Mbissine Thérèse Diop communicate with blunt eloquence so much of this person beyond the indignities inflicted upon her, making her plight all the more unbearable. They attune us to her heritage, her dreams, her tenacity; to her ordinary decency; to her feelings of cultural dislocation and loss of self-possession in a literal domestic prison. Black Girl is a staggeringly tragic film in its depiction of an individual destroyed by a seemingly incurable colonial mentality, but it is the opposite of a resigned one. Sembène’s angry first-person portrait opens up, in the end, into a collective announcement of national resistance and reclamation, in which a personification of Africa literally expunging one of the film’s white aggressors howls with an implacable defiance. A lacerating indictment of the post-colonial myth, Black Girl endures as one of the cinema’s most forthright and emotionally naked works of political modernism.

Sorry to Bother You

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU   ***

Boots Riley

2018

IDEA:  Cassius Green, a down-and-out black man in Oakland, takes a job as a telemarketer and quickly finds he's in for more than he bargained for when he uses his "white voice" to climb the corporate ladder.

BLURB:  In its florid absurdism, Sorry to Bother You seeks to unsettle us into a refreshed sensitivity toward the abhorrent social practices that have, especially in 2018, become frighteningly normalized. Riley’s cracked, defamiliarizing tactics claw away at whatever complacency or impression of sanity is possibly still adhering in an unraveling contemporary America. How could our own reality be any more outrageous? What happens when it stops feeling outrageous? Sorry to Bother You answers by refusing to let any capitalist apparatus or form of social control read as less than otherworldly, confounding, and dangerous. It consistently ramps up the outlandishness of its universe to the point where nothing seems out of the realm of possibility, where baffling perversity can be the only analog of our present day madness. Like any good satire, the real sociopolitical and cultural conditions it targets remain recognizable through the refracting mirror, but Riley’s film also argues that those real conditions – corporatized slave labor, white privilege, commodified violence, a class system – should always seem perverse. Sorry to Bother You unleashes a torrent of anarchic comedy and dizzying inventions that astutely channel a mood of dazed disbelief. Its images of militarized police brutality and worker protests, particularly, bristle with anger and a necessary spirit of rebellion. If Riley pursues the off-color irreverence of his premise to a fault, it nevertheless reflects the derangements of a social order to which we should never grow too numb.

Incredibles 2

INCREDIBLES 2   **

Brad Bird

2018

IDEA:  After a disastrous fight with the Underminer, the Incredibles are approached by a billionaire telecommunications scion who tries to rehabilitate their public image.

BLURB:  The most disappointing thing about Incredibles 2 is how content it seems with its consumerist mediocrity. Unlike the best films in the Pixar canon, which are distinguished by singular artistry and storytelling ingenuity, Brad Bird’s sequel looks and operates like a disposable, run-of-the-mill continuation of a popular commercial property. Although continuation might not be the right word: rather than progress the story of the Parr family or the world of “supers” in any meaningful way, Bird more or less rehashes the plot points, themes, and narrative beats of the original film, adding more flash and hectic activity without bothering to develop fully formed ideas behind it all. The inversion of gender roles is merely a feint at social commentary that only underscores how retrograde this edition feels. While Helen is busy going through the motions of the only strand of the story that really matters, the rest of the family is demoted to a stale subplot that stages clichéd, sexist domestic scenes of male ineptitude and female hysteria. Meanwhile, in a move that reeks of Disney influence, an inordinate amount of attention is devoted to the antics of the baby. His erratic, protean mischief is admittedly humorous, but how many times must we watch him combust or fly through walls before we’ve got the idea? Incredibles 2 seems to think simply showcasing and amplifying the foibles of these beloved characters is enough for another round, but the novelty is gone. While the film is breezy and fitfully inspired, it is hard to escape the sense that, after 14 years, the studio ought to have come up with something better than this.

Cold Water

COLD WATER   ***1/2

Olivier Assayas

1994

IDEA:  Two disaffected teenage lovers seek escape from their stifling home lives.

BLURB:  Coming after arid scenes of parental harangue and institutional-social malaise, the centerpiece sequence of Cold Water, a euphoric party-into-the-night scored to Janis Joplin, CCR, and Bob Dylan, arrives like an earthquake. It is a jolt to the film’s and spectator’s systems, a seismic affective shift that erupts the restless adolescent energy that had previously been conspicuously subdued. Assayas’s camera, channeling this unshackling, weaves through the exultant teenage revelers in breathlessly unbroken takes, making the scene as much about joyous release as one of exorbitant, distended time. Yet even as it marks a pronounced tonal departure, Assayas is careful not to make the party into a wish-fulfillment fantasy. As it transpires in its indulgent duration, the pleasurable feeling of jouissance becomes gradually subsumed by a sense of inertia and futility. Parents come searching for their daughter, briefly but unsuccessfully restoring narrative progress; the jukebox of songs furnishing the sensory experience begins to sound rote; the systematic destruction of the squalid building housing the party, and the blazing bonfire, seem more like signifiers of a danse macabre than a celebratory escape. And after the haze of disenchantment sets in the next morning, as it must, Assayas launches his final and most austere stretch, in which freedom and futurity itself dissolve into vaguer and vaguer ideas. Cold Water is a powerful bottling of teenage discontent and that desperate urge to find somewhere – anywhere – that might be more accommodating.

They Live

THEY LIVE   ***1/2

John Carpenter

1988

IDEA:  When a vagabond puts on a pair of sunglasses he finds at an abandoned church, he is awakened to the truth that the moneyed classes are extra-terrestrials brainwashing the masses through media.

BLURB:  What, exactly, is the nature of They Live’s relationship with consumer culture? The film’s vision of a society ruled by an alien power elite that manipulates and enslaves the working class through mass media is certainly an unmistakable ideological critique. Indeed, Carpenter’s realization of this quintessential Marxist dogma is so blatant as to be brilliant, so vividly, bluntly imagined that we wince and laugh not because he is revealing some buried truth, but because he is embossing the obvious to the point of absurdity. They Live mostly operates within this hyperbolic mode of satire, mocking, specifically, the inane and exaggerated machismo of 80s action films, sending up their sensationalized violence and jingoistic politics in sequences of anarchic, self-consciously silly excess. These scenes, which can be at once horrific and hilarious, exhibit a dissonance that makes They Live especially rich: they are the source of the film’s giddy thrills but also its troubling contradictions, images of our familiarized commercial pleasure that bite back. Yet, true to its postmodernist penchant for irony and pastiche, it is difficult to disentangle Carpenter’s film from the objects of its contempt. To what degree is the director merely reproducing the mind-numbing spectacle of the culture he’s indicting? Should a film targeting systemic social oppression be this fun, this digestible? They Live prompts us to question if any product of capitalism can be truly subversive. Its sardonic indulgence in the language of mass-mediated culture might even belie a piercing cynicism: that because the system in which we and the film are embedded cannot be vanquished, humor and amused recognition are maybe our last real defenses.