Uncut Gems

UNCUT GEMS   ***1/2

Josh and Benny Safdie

2019

IDEA:  A jeweler in New York City's Diamond District desperately attempts to claw his way out of a series of debts, placing his faith on a rock he's procured from Ethiopia that's allegedly worth over a million dollars.

BLURB:  Walking a particularly tremulous tightrope, Uncut Gems is at once a withering indictment of commodity culture and capitalist exploitation and a deliciously screwball symphony of bad judgment, its sense of escalating mayhem equally conducive to expressing the terrifying freefall and manic farce of one man’s sensational flameout. This idiosyncratic tonal mixture is seeded in the opening sequence, in which the Safdie brothers boldly juxtapose timeless geologic beauty with humanly abjection, setting material greed, capital worship, and subjugation on an ancient temporal plane that has evolved and warped across millennia. Where it ends up is inside the splenetic body of Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner, an inveterate huckster and gambler whose entire life cosmology is predicated on monetary transactions in pursuit of an impossible profit. Channeling and reinforcing the relentlessness of his wheeling-and-dealing, the Safdies create a whirlwind of barely controlled chaos, their scenes increasingly fueled by proliferating conflicts and mishaps tied to Ratner’s compulsive, almost primal need for the agitation of modern capitalist life. That this life can really only lead to spiritual, cultural, and physical depletion is the thesis underlying even Uncut Gems’ most brazenly comic constructions, an axiom that one waits in uneasy anticipation to spring on its unexamined protagonist. Yet while the Safdies are primarily concerned with Ratner’s epic follies, they don’t lay the blame on just him, or merely on his disastrous choices; rather, like the mythical allure of the opal at the film's center, everyone becomes ensnared by the market logics of an economy whose cessation would spell our own.

A Hidden Life

A HIDDEN LIFE   ***

Terrence Malick

2019

IDEA:  Based on the true story of Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to vow his oath to Hitler during World War II. 

BLURB:  Verdant mountains extend as far as the eye can see, towering into the sky, shimmering in streams of crystal water as implacable and enveloping as the blankets of rolling mist. The pastoral Alpine landscape of A Hidden Life is as quintessentially a breathing monument to the sublimity of nature as Malick has ever conjured, an earthly cathedral that invites our full-bodied reverence. For the first half of the film it appears in nearly every shot, wide-angle lenses wrapping it around the characters, rendering the very condition of being-in-the-world as an inextricable, continuous intertwinement with a splendor that is always there, even when your consciousness intends elsewhere. As ever, Malick is all about guiding it back. In A Hidden Life, perhaps more than ever before, he does this with laser-focused political intent, framing the spectacular plenitude of nature as a constant, cosmic rebuke to the festering evil of fascism. Through the unwaveringly principled Franz, a humble steward of that nature, Malick conveys how moral responsibility is a fortifying act allied with social and ecological perdurance. To turn one’s back on virtue, he argues, is not merely to abandon personal ethics but to diminish all of the world. Frustratingly, A Hidden Life sheds some of its power as that diminution is forced upon Franz, the tautological scenes of his imprisonment tending to blunt both theme and affect. But at its best, the film invokes the awesome magnitude of life beyond the bounds of our futilely constricting human systems, and attains its poignancy by wondering what the world might be like if conscientiousness didn’t so often have to be an audacious position.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE   ***1/2

Céline Sciamma

2019

IDEA:  On a remote part of Brittany in the 18th century, an artist and the woman whose marriage portrait she's hired to paint find themselves falling in love.

BLURB:  The portrait around which Portrait of a Lady on Fire revolves is the product and locus of reciprocating female gazes, a representation of a history of women’s voices and labor hidden and subsumed under patriarchal culture. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a mise-en-abyme of Céline Sciamma’s film itself. Like the painting, which is forged from the intimate and egalitarian meeting of female subjects, Portrait of a Lady on Fire fashions itself as a distaff oasis, restoring to the canons of both painting and cinema the agency of women. It is in this uncovered milieu that Marianne and Héloïse are free to entwine their gazes and their bodies, as well as to explore roles of subjectivity and representation that find their conduits in the visual arts. Sciamma’s frames, alternately awash in limpid pastels and lit in golden Vermeer light, effectively turn the medium of film into an extension of painting, taking portraits of the central women in lingering two-shots that allow every minute gesture to seem infinitely present, impressing themselves upon our memories. But Portrait of a Lady on Fire is as much about the power of the gaze to hold and retain as it is about its transience, its inability to fully materially grasp an object, no matter how intently ones stares. It’s in this way that Sciamma’s film charts a fairly familiar trajectory of forbidden love made briefly, hotly present. But by situating this narrative within this idiom, and by interrogating the politics of its aesthetics, she is able to make it into something that defies the fate of its romance: a portrait that indexes a whole other world of feeling and desire that no mimetic image can contain.

Waves

WAVES   ***1/2

Trey Edward Shults

2019

IDEA:  An African-American family in southern Florida deals with the repercussions of their decisions.

BLURB:  True to the title, emotions and sensations cascade through Trey Edward Shults’ film like barreling waves, endlessly redistributing between its characters rations of grief, rage, and hope. Leaning as heavily into formalist flourishes as fervid melodrama, the director makes the film into a palpitating field of intensities, a living mood ring that makes you feel every hot, cold, devastating, and rapturous temperamental vagary in appropriately oscillating surges. What Shults is after here, and what he conveys with such affective force through this rhythmic expressionism, is how people inherit and transfer energies both positive and harmful, and particularly how this manifests within one family’s fragile ecosystem. The first part of Waves, which is orchestrated more like a bullet-paced thriller than a domestic drama, is focused primarily on the harmful energies. Plunged into the subjectivity of the obstinate, overweening Tyler, it’s a breathless flurry of 360-degree pans, booming music cues, and strobes blurring into police lights, a portrait of a young man’s downfall precipitated by a father, and by extension a culture of masculinity, that equates strength with dominance. The second half is no less immersive, even as it replaces Tyler’s blinkered male perspective with the more open, feminized one of his sister. Here, Waves ambitiously revises and redeems the tragedy that cleaves it in two, showing how the aftermath of a family trauma can, in the best case scenario, be transmuted into redemptive love and understanding. Shults’ move toward the homiletic in this part flirts with the banal, and risks awarding easy resolutions where none exist. But it’s the bone-deep performances, the naked emotionality, and the director’s visceral command of form and feeling that give Waves its sense of tidal release.

Marriage Story

MARRIAGE STORY   ***1/2

Noah Baumbach

2019

IDEA:  A New York-based theater director and his L.A.-bred actress wife negotiate a turbulent divorce process between the two cities, with their young son caught in the middle.

BLURB:  Marriage Story is a story of disparities personal, vocational, and geographical, in which the systems of divorce – legal as well as social – turn a couple's relatively normal foibles into the shaky grounds for battle. New York or Los Angeles, Father or Mother, Broadway or Hollywood; the dichotomies set up by Baumbach compound the couple’s sense of being miles apart both physically and mentally, and coalesce into a conflict that outgrows, and then risks devouring, the humble, unquantifiable feelings on which their relationship is founded. The pain that emerges largely stems from the situation of two well-meaning people having to uncertainly depend on systems that can’t summarize, contain, or solve the complexities of their bond. Yet behind the hurt, underneath even its lacerating spats, Marriage Story is informed by an alleviating archness that indicates the narration of an artist using the medium as a performative form of self-exorcism. Humor pops from nearly every scene thanks to the director’s trademark badinage, pointing up the absurdity of legal processes here, wryly twisting the tenor of a conversation there. Comedy has rarely seemed so cathartic in a Baumbach film, to the point where it can, at times, undercut the interpersonal anguish. Viewed through the lens of auto-fiction, however, even the most comically heightened of characterizations come to read as reflections of someone creatively processing their experiences. This might suggest that Baumbach is smoothing over the past, or gesturing at self-exoneration, but that’s not the case. What is remarkable about this portrait is how mature and even-handed it is, how it finds in both partners qualities that invite vexation and understanding. It’s not called Divorce Story, after all; through the aching performances of Driver and Johansson, the film locates in discord an underlying intimacy that can’t be fully extinguished.

The Irishman

THE IRISHMAN   ***1/2

Martin Scorsese

2019

IDEA:  Former hit-man and Teamster Frank Sheeran recounts his time working for Jimmy Hoffa and the mob.

BLURB:  The Irishman runs over three hours and spans some fifty years, but you rarely feel the passage of either its narrative or onscreen time. Like a memory, duration empties out of it; days and years blur together through Thelma Schoonmaker’s typically propulsive edits, shuttling us between events whose temporal thickness gets flattened in the accumulation of experience. Faces, smoothed over and detached from both their actors’ appearances and our historical knowledge of them, exist outside of time altogether. This is an unusual effect for a long, reflective story about the tolls of history, but rather than hinder the film by robbing it of narrative sweep or physical heft, the approach allows Scorsese to do something he’s never done before in his prior gangster films: to show, with a grave, rueful moral lucidity, the permeating hollowness and existential futility of a life lived without ethics. Even during scenes most obviously designed for excitement, The Irishman is punctured by the melancholy of Frank Sheeran’s present-day testimony, coloring all the violence and corruption with a sobering hindsight. We know what it all leads to; Scorsese even compounds the sense of inevitability through chyrons revealing the characters’ mostly ignominious deaths. The film, although one of the director’s least visually remarkable works, is always reliably absorbing, invigorated by a host of strong performances and a snappy script from Zaillian. And then, of course, there’s the ballast around which it all must return: the image of De Niro’s superannuated Sheeran sitting in a nursing home, frail and alone. Now mere fragments of the past, what have all the hits, rackets, car bombs, retaliations, and ruthless political maneuvers amounted to? Stories, Scorsese says, that become movies about men who, if they’re lucky, will grow into old age accompanied only by memories.

Parasite

PARASITE   ***

Bong Joon-ho

2019

IDEA:  Desperate for money, the poor Kim family deceives its way into getting jobs with the upper-class Parks.

BLURB:  Parasite is an energetic, audacious, unwieldy work of social satire that boldly, if not always cohesively, marries genre thrills with capitalist critique. As he has done before, Bong here chews into society’s systemic, seemingly irreconcilable class divisions with a nervy relish, turning the frictions that arise from economic disparity into the engine for an increasingly macabre spectacle. His build-up, in which each member of the indigent Kim family finds employment with the affluent Parks through a chain of bogus referrals, is wonderfully funny and punchy in execution, and gives the title of the film its initial, explicit connotation. Yet we know it can’t be this easy; the cards are going to have to collapse eventually. And when they do, in an acutely chilling reveal, Bong introduces compelling new narrative and thematic dimensions that both productively complicate and muddy his message. It is here when the immorality and ill effects of the Kims’ scheme take hold in an unexpected way, and when Parasite shifts from a mostly straightforward tale of class envy and guile to a woolly one about intra-class warfare. The meaning of the title becomes unstable as Bong shows the withering of the Kims and the other dispossessed, whose inabilities to transcend the literally subterranean are understood partly as byproducts of a system that lives by keeping them subdued, but also, dubiously, as the result of poor judgment. This critique gets more muddled in Bong’s penchant for flashy, churning dramatic machinations, which can reduce nuance in favor of sensational outcomes, and yield scenarios that are too divorced from existing social conditions to make much real-world sense. But as a broadly thrilling, twisty, and finally cynical commentary about impossible upward mobility, Parasite leaves a mark.

I Was at Home, But...

Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.

I WAS AT HOME, BUT...   **

Angela Schanelec

2019

IDEA:  Astrid struggles to keep her life together in the wake of her husband's death, while her children deal with the loss in their own way.

BLURB:  To some extent, the fractured, heavily decentered narrative approach and anti-naturalism Angela Schanelec employs in I Was at Home, But… are appropriate and intriguing. They make sense insofar as they communicate something of the film’s various states of grief, isolation, and generational distance, rooting its pervasive disconnect in an aesthetic experience that feels similarly cagey and out of reach. The problem is, Schanelec has so abstracted her narrative, and has made both its emotions and its form so willfully evasive, that the film struggles to achieve coherence. There are individually lovely moments here – a montage set to a forlorn cover of “Let’s Dance” is especially striking, as is a protracted, long-take diatribe that hilariously upends the film’s (and lead character’s) reticence – but their connective tissue is tenuous, and the themes and ideas that surround them are too obfuscated by labored conceits to really register as more than pieces of an abstruse exercise. This could be read as an auto-critique, reflecting Astrid’s contempt for the “fakeness” of mimetic performance and her insistence that actors can never really capture people’s internal realities. Schanelec certainly affirms this notion through her film’s deliberate remoteness and impassivity, but to what point is insufficiently clear.

Ghost Tropic

Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.

GHOST TROPIC   **1/2

Bas Devos

2019

IDEA:  After falling asleep on the train and missing her stop, a cleaning lady must find her way back home at night. 


BLURB:  A becalmed, nocturnal city symphony, Ghost Tropic envisions Brussels at night as a place where subordinated people and histories become centered, alive to the city that regards them at day as phantoms. It’s the domain of immigrant laborers like the Muslim Khadija, who, removed from the bustle of the urban workday, is able to see her adopted hometown for what it really is: a community propped up on the unrecognized contributions of those living and toiling in the margins. When she misses her train stop on the way back from work, she is not geographically or culturally lost. Rather, in her alternating aloneness and civic communion, she is at one with an environment she knows as well as anyone. Through Grimm Vandekerckhove’s ethereal 16mm cinematography, the roads and buildings around her seem to buzz with enchanted life; pools of light and color animate the darkness, flaring at the edges of the frame or shimmering in wet pavement, turning streetlamps into otherworldly sentinels. Ghost Tropic is visually spellbinding, and while this is often enough to carry its lean, ambient minimalism, there is also the sense that such immaculate aestheticism has smothered some of its narrative and affective range. This might be why Khadija often comes across as more of a static concept than a flesh-and-blood person, the film’s phlegmatic tone and texture tending to iron out any emotional kinks. The images here are suitably gorgeous and insinuating, but they might have gained impact if feelings of equal depth had greater room to peek through.

And Then We Danced

Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.

AND THEN WE DANCED   ***

Levan Akin

2019

IDEA:  Merab is competing to land a place in a traditional Georgian dance ensemble, something that becomes complicated when he falls for a male rival.

BLURB:  Dance is a performance of tradition and an escape from it in Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced, a fairly formulaic but finally rousing paean to the irrepressibility of queer individuality. The ultra-conservative Georgian society depicted by Akin certainly tries its best to repress it, though. At nearly every turn, the young gay Merab is confronted by rhetoric that shuns him, his ambitions under attack by the entrenched attitudes and expectations that disavow his social and creative value. Most crushingly, he finds resistance even from the discipline that has anchored him since youth, as lectures from his stern dance director keep reinforcing what little place his “softness” has in an art based on doctrinaire, nationalist-historical notions of masculinity. Yet even during its most turbulent emotional valleys, And Then We Danced is never interested in drumming up pathos just to tell another story of tragic persecution. Seemingly using the film’s titular activity to inform its rhythm, Akin and his DP instead convey an agility and musicality of movement that is frequently elating, with an eclectic soundtrack of Georgian folk songs and ABBA accentuating the buoyant spirit of a young generation. Incredible newcomer Levan Gelbakhiani absorbs and reflects this energy through his limber body, communicating everything from the lightness of romantic ecstasy to the weight of pain and dejection in canny shifts of comportment. When the film is most constrained by narrative convention, his sinuous, insistent physicality and emotional transparency give him the tools he needs to break away.

The Whistlers

Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.

THE WHISTLERS   ***

Corneliu Porumboiu

2019

IDEA:  Following a botched laundering operation he played a part in carrying out, dirty cop Cristi travels to the Canary Islands to learn a whistling language that will help him extricate a co-conspirator and recover the cash.

BLURB:  Bookended on one side by Iggy Pop and on the other by a literally symphonic spectacle of lights, The Whistlers is a distinctly different kind of film from Porumboiu, one that trades in his deadpan narrative minimalism for an incident-heavy genre exercise. Indulging in the tropes of policiers, noir, and all manner of global gangster drama, the director fills his runtime to the brim with subterfuge and double-crossings, creating a ceaseless flow of plot points whose sensationalism feels almost antithetical to the mundane durational processes that have thus far typified his work. It may lack assiduous structure and style – the film feels mostly perfunctory in at least its aesthetic execution – but lest one think the director has entirely relinquished his sensibility, The Whistlers exhibits enough of his thematic preoccupations to keep it reasonably in line with his prior studies of post-Communist Romanian life. For one, the focus on dubious authority remains in evidence, even more so than usual: from cops to criminals, nearly everyone here operates outside parameters of morality and justice, their actions rooted in systems that barely even masquerade as lawful. And in this pervasive corruption, which revolves around the convoluted fallout of a laundering scheme, Porumboiu again invokes the disorienting ideological muddle of his country, where the institutional residue of Communism intermingles indelicately with old-world piety and capitalist ideas of monetary wealth. The director is obviously having fun playing with genre conventions, and it’s enjoyable to see his bureaucratic rigmarole translated into something so lively.

Pain and Glory

PAIN AND GLORY   ***

Pedro Almodóvar

2019

IDEA:  On the eve of a repertory screening of one of his old works, a filmmaker beset by physical and mental ailments reminisces about his life. 


BLURB:  A warm, confessional work of auto-fiction, Pain and Glory movingly figures Almodóvar’s life as an ongoing act of cinematic self-realization, with everything he’s gone through finding dramatic purpose and cathartic emotional outlet through the conduit of his chosen medium. Here, it’s a process that’s actively literalized via meta-text, as Antonio Banderas’ infirm director Salvador Mallo, Almodóvar’s stand-in, reflects on all the people, places, and events that have shaped his career and life trajectories. Naturally, he recollects his Catholic upbringing, his mother, his sexual awakening; all the relationships broken by the depredations of time and circumstance. He might be unable to make movies, but these bittersweet reveries themselves become the movie before us, instinctually transmuting the weariness and nostalgia of Almodóvar’s more advanced years into both its explicit content and its underlying catalyst. Pain and Glory thus becomes a testament to cinema as a channel for personal coping and spiritual rejuvenation, its episodic structure playing host to a series of poignant rapprochements that interpret Almodóvar’s experiences within the therapeutic imaginary space of the screen. Although he sometimes tips over into self-congratulation, an easy hazard for memoir, the director avoids arrogance by sensitively conveying how no fictional film, not even an autobiographical one, can possibly be made alone, and how no individual is ever an island. The characters who appear throughout – a former actor, a laborer, and, in its most extraordinary scene, an old flame – are understood as equals and collaborators, the people without whom his visions could never be realized. And in the gentle, rueful, frequently palliating feelings they generate, Pain and Glory posits itself, indeed cinema in general, as a kind of eternal salve for the soul.

Joker

JOKER   ***

Todd Phillips

2019

IDEA:  A man who works as a clown grows progressively more unhinged as he succumbs to his deteriorating mental state.

BLURB:  From its opening title card of the eponymous character lying beaten in an alleyway, Joker powerfully conjures a sense of seeping, viscous anomie. It permeates the air like a miasma, coating every graffiti- and garbage-strewn surface of the film’s squalid, 1980s-era New York-Gotham City. Choked by both super rats and social apathy, it’s a milieu whose urban decay matches its moral attrition, and its visceral expression of suffocating spiritual malaise is the best achievement of Joker. Phillips realizes this environment with such enveloping dysphoria, and with such a palpable feeling for how its rotted support systems can leave its most vulnerable inhabitants hopelessly adrift, that we buy how it could produce as deranged a symptom as Phoenix’s Fleck. Through unnerving sound design and constrictive shallow-focus photography – and, of course, through Phoenix’s rivetingly disquieting performance – Phillips proficiently submerges us in Fleck’s increasingly delusional, delirious psyche, intensifying the societal bleakness to convey how it might appear to someone whose sanity it’s helping corrode. It’s a minor triumph of framing psychology within a tangible cultural context; where Joker becomes muddled, ironically, is in how it tries (or doesn’t) to negotiate this verisimilitude with its comic origins. Phillips and Silver want the film to be a kind of etiology of this outsize super-villain, but by attempting to explain him through all-too real socioeconomic phenomena, they often end up compromising the legacy of the character or reducing the phenomena to easy, specious diagnostic causes. They explicitly evoke the chaos of our modern climate, and yet this Joker doesn’t really add up to the profile of a believable real-life maniac. Still, what the film lacks in nuance it makes up for in impact. It may not hold as refined sociological analysis, but in limning a queasily familiar milieu, it effectively suggests the curdled systemic conditions that allow madness to flourish.

The Treasure

THE TREASURE   ***1/2

Corneliu Porumboiu

2015

IDEA:  In dire economic straits, a man recruits his neighbor to help search for treasure allegedly buried by his great-grandfather before the Communist takeover.

BLURB:  With The Treasure, Corneliu Porumboiu takes the simplest of metaphors – digging in the earth as an excavation of the past – and turns it into the locus of a characteristically droll, mordant portrait of post-Communist Romanian society. As in his other films, the accumulating subtext derives from how a seemingly straightforward activity becomes enfolded in a host of complicated (and complicating) procedural factors, drawing from the quotidian a dense tangle of socio-historical vectors. And that tangle constitutes, for Porumboiu, the fundamentally absurd social fabric of a contemporary Romania, where the past is paradoxically a memory both vague and indelible, and the vestiges of Communism live in vexed relation with the structures of capitalism. It’s an awkward hybridity evinced by the characters’ tetchy interactions, which are informed as much by civic or filial kinship as by capitalist transaction, financial desperation, and questions of material ownership. Porumboiu underscores these ideas against backdrops that range from austerely bureaucratic to quasi-purgatorial, culminating in the protracted treasure hunting scene, whose long, recursive takes hardly seem to signal the promise of a life-changing bounty. Of course, that’s beside the point: what is symbolically disinterred is the country’s fractured 20^th-century history, with the hole as the gouge of the Ceaușescu era and its contents the tentative economic transformation that followed. Neither, alas, are reassuring. In its final sequence, which plays like a bitterly ironic punchline to this mischievous, multi-layered 90-minute joke, The Treasure suggests a future generation inheriting not the legacy of the past, but the triumphant consumerism of a present they’ve never known as anything else.

Ad Astra

AD ASTRA   ***1/2

James Gray

2019

IDEA:  Sometime in the near future, an astronaut is enlisted to travel to Mars to make contact with his missing dad, whose mission to find life on Neptune ended in disaster.

BLURB:  In Ad Astra, outer space is both a horizon of socio-techno possibility and a spiritual gulf, a vastness reflecting back humanity’s multitudinous contradictions and inner conflicts. Space is always some kind of metaphor, but by rejecting the metaphysical and transcendent properties commonly attached to it, Gray’s stately, exquisitely internalized drama turns it into something inescapably anthropomorphic, less an other-space of speculation than a tunnel into the psyche. Specifically, the psyche of Brad Pitt’s Roy McBride, whose quest to find his father becomes a progressively more pensive, dark-night-of-the-soul reckoning with himself. Depicted by Gray with absorbing procedural rigor as he steadily advances us between checkpoints, Roy’s journey gradually morphs from one of ambivalent professional duty to one of obsessive personal interest, surfacing the repressed feelings that have, all along, underpinned his work and identity. His traversal of the solar system is thus a traversal of societal and psychical distances, an attempt to resolve the discrepancies between aspirations and reality that seem to structure Ad Astra’s world of futurist disappointments. Progress does not erase human foibles or prevailing cultural systems, Gray suggests, so much as magnify and stretch them out, the canvas of the cosmos setting into relief all those things so innate to the species: knowledge, ambition, and the wills to create and destroy. And, of course, the propensity for self-awareness and introspection, which Pitt embodies as the most achingly primordial of existential conditions. Despite its heavy air of disillusionment, Ad Astra is not leaden or resigned. Just skirting triteness, it instead locates in its personal crucible a humanity worth holding on to, as long as we can.

Araby

ARABY   **1/2

João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa

2017

IDEA:  Through his diary, peripatetic laborer Cristiano tells of his arduous life on the road.

BLURB:  As an elegiac ode to the invisible, exploited lives of migrant laborers, Araby is considerably affecting. Its first-person perspective gives valuable interiority to one such worker, elevating his status beyond the marginalized position capitalist society assigns him. Here he tells his own story, and we see how the effects of itinerancy, impersonal industrial labor, and a system designed to keep one disenfranchised gradually wear away a person’s sense of purpose and possibility. The film is smart in how it addresses these socioeconomic conditions without sensationalism, honoring Cristiano simply by devoting ordinary attention to his life and work, using a journal to give us access to thoughts and feelings that would otherwise go unexpressed. But Araby’s unadorned straightforwardness is also limiting. Outside of its oblique first act, the film’s narrative approach is largely prosaic, favoring expository voice-over and a rigid, this-then-this recounting of events. There is a flatness to this narration that is reinforced by the visuals, which seldom rise above the level of functional. Perhaps that’s right for the story of a regular working-class man, one whose life hardly needs frills to be worth telling. Still, there’s the nagging feeling that the idea of Araby is more praiseworthy than its actual execution; only at its lyrical, plaintive coda do the two achieve true synthesis.

First Name: Carmen

FIRST NAME: CARMEN   ***

Jean-Luc Godard

1983

IDEA:  While robbing a bank to ostensibly get money to finance a film, a woman ends up falling in love with a feckless guard.

BLURB:  “In memoriam small movies,” reads Godard’s droll epitaph. Following one such presumably “small” movie, what would be a characteristically grandiose statement from the director, a bombastic claim akin to Weekend’s eulogy to cinema in toto, instead acts as archly self-deprecating punctuation. First Name: Carmen is a scherzo, a proud trifle in which Godard, cast as a deflated, washed-up version of himself, sends up his own repertoire of predilections. Discontinuity and asynchronous sound proliferate; artistic and political maxims become self-parodic. The plot, as it were, is a sort of “behind-the-scenes” meta-narrative, only here, the would-be filmmakers and financiers are outlaws, and instead of making their own movie, they’re unwittingly facilitating the one we’re watching. It’s as if the bedraggled Godard, by stepping in front of the camera, has ceded his film(s) to the subjects he often makes them about: consumer capitalism and battles of the sexes, criminality and rebellion, here diegetic forces that seem to have usurped his authority. First Name: Carmen is familiar in how it calls attention to its artifice, but it’s also unusual in how it largely hides the materialism it talks about, how it intimates a kind of auto-production that occurred while Godard was putzing around somewhere. The film is the director at his fleetest and least high-handed, even as it makes its effacements into impishly self-regarding gestures.

Under the Silver Lake

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE   ***

David Robert Mitchell

2018

IDEA:  After his new, alluring neighbor inexplicably disappears, an L.A. slacker follows a series of cryptic bread crumbs to find her.

BLURB:  Saturated with circuitous chains of allusions and inter-textual quotes, the Los Angeles of Under the Silver Lake suggests the city as pastiche, as an oneiric urban space constructed from the phantoms of its cultural products. It’s a 21^st-century (un)reality as imagined by Andrew Garfield’s Sam, a sort of exemplary, semi-toxic millennial layabout whose media obsessions are all that’s holding together the tatters of his existence. Rootless, disaffected, and economically and sexually vexed, he latches onto arcane codes and patterns in a desperate bid to anchor his life and the fathomless culture around it to some semblance of meaning. David Robert Mitchell alternately confounds and affirms him: he shows Sam’s convoluted, paranoiac fixations on cryptology and conspiracy to be as crazed and ultimately otiose as they are, humorously drowning him in dead ends and absurd reveals, but he also shows that his paranoia is basically justified. Like John Carpenter’s They Live, one of Mitchell’s bountiful references, the joke of Under the Silver Lake is that the ideological mechanisms that underlie society don’t really need to be uncovered; however elaborately they may manifest themselves, they exist more or less out in the open, and we’re powerless to do anything with our knowledge other than bask in a vague sense of enlightenment. A monument to semiotic overload, Under the Silver Lake reflects a uniquely contemporary, contradictory condition of a hyper-mediated world: the feeling of being simultaneously bewildered and all-too aware.

Moonrise

MOONRISE   ***

Frank Borzage

1948

IDEA:  Danny has been ridiculed and abused mercilessly since his father was hanged for shooting a man. After he kills one of his tormenters during a fight, he attempts to evade the consequences.

BLURB:  When a film comes out of the gate with as much brio as Moonrise, the likelihood of it sustaining such vigor is fairly low. It’s not exactly a surprise, then, that this is the case with Borzage’s film. Following a jolting opening, in which the traumatic history that haunts the protagonist is conveyed in paroxysms of expressionistic shadows and alarming cuts, the film settles into a more straightforward vein as Dane Clark’s Danny tries to outrun both his past and the law. Borzage and Russell’s rich visual palette remains, but the opening’s visceral shocks are replaced by more prosaic evocations of shame and guilt, symbolized by noose-like hangings and constricted, tenebrous spaces. Still, Borzage keeps an anguished and compassionate focus on Danny, and he keeps us shrewdly attuned to his psychological state. Through its audiovisual repetitions, the film displays both an understanding of anxiety’s circular structure and the ways it finds a correlative in the narrative and formal conventions of noir. Perhaps the ultimate success of Moonrise, however, is in how it finally breaks from those conventions to give its protagonist redemptive agency. Swerving away from the standard postwar fatalism, Borzage pronounces a belief in the ability of man to absolve himself from violence and trauma, mostly with the help of women’s love and wisdom. It’s earnest to a fault, but it’s also a relieving breath of air that lifts the film’s damp pall.

Katzelmacher

KATZELMACHER   ***

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1969

IDEA:  A group of desultory, financially and sexually frustrated friends respond with fear and contempt when a Greek immigrant enters their circle.

BLURB:  The vapid bourgeois characters in Katzelmacher spend all their time gossiping and demeaning each other, stalled in a recursive sequence of toxic lassitude. In their flat, ossified world, bigotry and moral sloth don’t have any pretty facades to hide behind. They are as stark and frontal-facing as the austere frames that hold the characters in place like mannequins stuck in molasses, unashamedly spewing forth from the mouths of those who see love, friendship, and community only as opportunities for exploitation. Yes, this is a Fassbinder film. But whereas the director’s later films couch all this misanthropy in variously baroque mise-en-scènes, Katzelmacher is the bare-bones version of Fassbinder’s despairing, unsparing worldview, stripped down to its lacerating parts. Essentially a series of static takes of characters exchanging insults, deadpanning morose aphorisms, and finally spouting all-too familiar xenophobic rhetoric, the film is as direct and pitiless a commentary on the social barbarism of the privileged classes as one could ask for. There is a brute, minimalist elegance here that is ruthlessly efficient, from the frankness of the dialogue to the curt, razor-edged edits that end each scene before the next starts the process all over. Even at 89 minutes, the effect of this repetitious, one-track vileness is oppressive – and no doubt, Fassbinder’s intent. His mercilessly forthright approach leaves no buffer room for his dissolute characters, or for us.

My Winnipeg

MY WINNIPEG   ****

Guy Maddin

2007

IDEA:  Stuck on a train full of sleeping passengers, Guy Maddin dreams of finding his way out of Winnipeg.

BLURB:  An exemplary, modestly magisterial work of autobiography and folk confabulation, city symphony and urban mythologizing, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg seizes the spectator like a lucid dream. Carried along on relentless flurries of memory, history, and imagination, it creates a portrait of place not in its concrete reality, but in its lived and remembered experience, its psychic undercurrents and affective reverberations. In a kind of culmination of his fixation with making the past return, Maddin sculpts from the snowdrifts of his mind his most cohesive primal fantasy, reanimating his-story by answering the archaic anxieties and drives that fuel the cinematic project. Through his hypnagogic vision of Winnipeg, he creates the ultimate urban origin myth to restore, however briefly, presence and historicity to a city blurred by blizzards; analogously, to relocate his identity by enacting his self-formation, harnessing the psychical traces of his childhood and inscribing them in an external imaginary world. Although Maddin, as ever, sometimes overdoes the cuteness of his conceits, My Winnipeg has such a bottomless supply of mystery, humor, and poignancy it is rarely hobbled. There are few films that so intimately understand the roles imagination and metaphor play in how we give meaning to places, that reflect Ben Highmore’s conception of the city as a “tangle of physicality and symbolism, the sedimentation of various histories, the mingling of imaginings and experience.” My Winnipeg makes palpable the reciprocity and interpenetration of body and place, psychology and geography, past and present, one endlessly shaping the other.

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD   **

Quentin Tarantino

2019

IDEA:  In 1969 Hollywood, an actor of TV westerns struggles with his declining stardom, while his stuntman happens upon a dangerous cult.

BLURB:  Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is an extravaganza of fetishes that finds Tarantino applying his signature brand of historical revisionism to a 1960s Hollywood engorged with his pop-cultural obsessions. Everywhere in the lavish production design and soundtrack is a signifier of some beloved media, a billboard, poster, radio advertisement, or television clip elevated to nostalgic fetish object. Within this fastidiously reconstructed milieu wander DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton and Pitt’s Cliff Booth, avatars of a faded Hollywood glory. They, too, are fetish objects, ego ideals – especially Pitt’s macho golden boy – Tarantino uses to save his bygone era. The same goes for Robbie’s Tate, but with less dimension: the director is uncomfortably content with simply employing her as a symbol of mythic pureness and optimism, a beautiful doll to be swathed in the protective wrapping of an imaginary past. Although the nostalgia is gratuitous in a way one expects from this director and this idiom, it does yield a richly realized world; one that feels like the fairytale crucible of Tarantino’s birth, an anatomy of the components that have formed his pop-culture-constituted, Frankenstein’s monster identity. Yet too often, Once Upon a Time… turns its nostalgia into a reactionary project of narrative fetishism, an act of denial with troubling implications. Not only does Tarantino crassly conflate the Manson family with the hippie counterculture, he reductively uses them as a catch-all metaphor to signal undesirable social change. And by the time he gets to his inevitable violent fantasy, Tarantino shows how limited his creative abilities are in processing realities that call for more than a bloody intervention, and how ultimately incapable he is of leaving his juvenile worldview in the past.

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism

WHEN EVENING FALLS ON BUCHAREST OR METABOLISM   ***

Corneliu Porumboiu

2013

IDEA:  A filmmaker struggles to get his film made while having an affair with one of his actresses.

BLURB:  When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism is nothing so much as a self-reflexive critique of a self-important character, a film self-consciously designed to deflate its own protagonist’s dogmatic, self-centered worldview. That’s a lot of “selfs,” which indicates how much of a hermetic, closed-circuit conceptual exercise Porumboiu’s film is. But if it doesn’t exactly look beyond itself, When Evening Falls… nevertheless stimulates in its meta-textual games, and delights in how it uses its form to poke fun at itself and the aforementioned protagonist’s creative ego. As the hunched, black turtleneck-clad Paul, Bogdan Dumitrache embodies the pedantry and pretentiousness of a filmmaker who believes in only one mode and method of cinema, tied to a specious notion of realism. But when he’s not undermining his own stringent philosophies, Porumboiu is doing it for him, deploying formalism to wryly contradict the pompous director’s dictates. So, when Paul says he’s shooting on film due to the productive restrictions it imposes, mentioning that film can record no longer than 11 minutes continuously, Porumboiu shoots in long takes around that length to underline the arbitrariness of such material limits. And when Paul suggests the supreme naturalism of long takes, Porumboiu shows us just how mannered they can be. By focusing on and believing only in what he can control in his film, Paul fails to account for all the other contingencies that impact his project. Ironically, it’s the footage of his endoscopy that’s the most “real,” successful thing he produces, and it’s not even his. When the film ends by having Alina take over the center of both Paul’s and Porumboiu’s films, the image of the solipsistic man is finally expelled, symbolically supplanted by the more flexible body, and mind, he disavows.

Private Property

PRIVATE PROPERTY   ***1/2

Leslie Stevens

1960

IDEA:  Two drifters with eyes on an upscale suburban woman infiltrate her Beverly Hills home.

BLURB:  Bolstering its nervy B-movie rawness with aesthetic elegance and psychological realism, Private Property is so potent precisely because it takes its sordid premise so seriously. As a result, what is essentially the stuff of tawdry erotic fiction becomes a vehicle for filtering the suburban discontent of postwar America, its classed and gendered frictions ideally suited to the economic desperation and psychosexual mania of noir. As the ruffians who weasel their way into a woman’s Beverly Hills mansion, Warren Oates and Corey Allen are excellent at embodying shades of masculine entitlement as well as curdling sexual frustration. Allen, playing the ringleader, is especially effective, his weary bravado and pathetic entreaties adding an undertow of vulnerability to the film’s portrait of violent male disaffection. And as the bourgeois housewife, Kate Manx makes poolside life pulse with a resonating sadness. Increasingly revealing eddies of ambivalent desire beneath her cautiously polite demeanor, the actress manages the tricky feat of convincing us of her lust for Allen’s rogue, that he might be the closest she gets, physically and psychologically, from escaping her gilded cage. The depth the trio of actors bring to their performances, plus nicely understated support from Robert Wark, fills the feverish chamber drama with an intense and authentic-feeling unease; a seeping malaise that not even the privileged in their elevated Los Angeles homes can keep out.

Toy Story 4

TOY STORY 4   ***

Josh Cooley

2019

IDEA:  When Bonnie loses her new "toy" on a family road trip, Woody and the gang set out to rescue him from an antiques shop.

BLURB:  All the Toy Story films are underpinned by the same evergreen tangle of existential anxieties, but in Toy Story 4, the angst takes on perhaps its most febrile form yet. This is largely due to the character of Forky. A bricolage of trash that inexplicably gains sentience, Forky is an exemplary unheimlich creation, cast-out matter that has returned from that abject place called the “garbage” to remind the toys (and the audience) of our fragile, contingent selves. With his exposed component parts, he reveals the body in its fundamentally violable corporeality, even as his consciousness transcends the individual functions of those pieces. As a result, he catalyzes thought-provoking questions around identity, which extend to a host of other new characters who, in their own ways, contemplate, mourn, or attempt to resolve problems around their origins and (intended) purposes. However foolhardy it may be to seriously analyze the ontological dimensions of the films' intricately realized but admittedly inconsistent universe, Toy Story 4’s heightened attention to its own material logic is its most fascinating development, and encourages productive evaluations of taken-for-granted existential knowledge. It also keeps the mind reeling through the slick but busy action scenes, and makes the jarringly photorealistic animation seem like an apt aesthetic to convey the tactile horrors lying in wait for a toy. Toy Story 4 may not be a patch on the Trilogy, but by amping up its characters’ neuroses, it produces unusual and memorable effects new to the series.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn

GOODBYE, DRAGON INN   ***1/2

Tsai Ming-liang

2003

IDEA:  On the final night before it closes, an old theater plays King Hu's 1967 Dragon Inn to a sparse audience.

BLURB:  The space that has historically grounded cinematic reception becomes its own object of aesthetic contemplation in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Through the camera’s extended gaze, the walls, seats, and labyrinthine back hallways of the theater – nearly everything but the screen – become animate, visible parts of the circuitry of our sensory experience. Their dual perceptual immediacy and multiply vacancy mirror the nature of film itself, displaced onto the (literal) architecture of spectatorship, a decaying cinema palace that seems aware of its own slow demise. Of course, this cinema exists on our screens, in agonizing suspension, as Tsai records and memorializes its disappearance. Sexual longings and nostalgia drift through its darkened corridors, the last remnants of the effects of this temple of desire; and always, in Tsai’s infinite temporizing, the sense of impossible consummation prevails. In Goodbye, Dragon Inn’s most breathtaking moments, including a hilariously protracted urinal visit and a late shot of the completely emptied, fully lit theater, Tsai encourages us to think about and corporeally feel time as cinema (his cinema) manipulates it, and to understand how the spaces of our spectatorship materially impact on this perception. And by slowing time to what feels like a standstill, he only intensifies our awareness of its passage; even the most static and “endless” of scenes must elapse. Goodbye, Dragon Inn may eulogize a communal moviegoing experience slipping into obsolescence, but in layering a fading reality with a dilated time, it makes loss, the past-ness endemic to all movies, into a concrete and lingering presence.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO   **1/2

Joe Talbot

2019

IDEA:  A young black man fights to reclaim his grandfather's Victorian house in a heavily gentrified San Francisco neighborhood.


BLURB:  The Last Black Man in San Francisco presents an unusual, rather gauche combination of subject matter and tone. It is a film that tackles the very real and destructive urban abuses of gentrification, environmental defilement, and the rippling effects of systemic racism, and yet it’s largely told in a heightened comic register in a universe that often tips into the patently absurd. There are moments when this outsize humor works to invigorate the film’s depiction of the titular city, imbuing it with idiosyncratic life and energy. But there are too many other times when glibness undercuts the issues being explored. This is most egregious in the scenes that attempt to satirize race relations, which hinge on facile, broadly discomfiting interactions between the black characters and the uniformly cartoonish white ones. Talbot and Fails often seem to fall back on millennial-friendly humor and fantastical scenarios as a crutch, as if they’re afraid they might slip into undue earnestness, and the result is strangely watery. Judging by their handling of the drama, however, there should have been no worry. The Last Black Man in San Francisco is at its best when it drops the silliness to focus genuinely on its two core relationships: those between Jimmie and Mont and between Jimmie and San Francisco. The former of these is so moving due to the performances of Fails and Majors, who create a lovely, tender rapport through shared disenfranchisement and off-center personalities. The latter relationship, which is the film’s elegiac ballast, is only more intimate, capturing Jimmie’s intense love for and historical rootedness in the city that has always been his home, and how that love becomes strained, if not defeated, by the city’s inability to keep loving him back. It’s in its final passage that The Last Black Man in San Francisco finds the balance between social anguish and bigheartedness that it often struggles with throughout, ending on a note that resonates because of its painful sincerity.

The Souvenir

THE SOUVENIR   ***

Joanna Hogg

2019

IDEA:  A film school student from a wealthy family falls in love with an older man in 1980s London.

BLURB:  The Souvenir is a film-souvenir, at least for filmmaker Joanna Hogg. As it transpires in its protracted attention to the minutiae of its mise-en-scène, one gets the sense that these starkly presented images are the material of Hogg’s memories. The layout of Julie’s flat, with its paneled wall-size mirror, diminutively attached kitchen, and window overlooking a row of London rooftops, has such sensory specificity and lived-in-ness it comes to read as the real-world referent it is almost certainly designed to represent. This is not to say the film produces a documentary consciousness, but that its detailed reconstruction attunes us to Julie’s, and by extension Joanna’s, remembered experience of a time and place. It also attunes us to the emotional textures and reflections of a woman negotiating work, a rare perspective in movies. The Souvenir is most affecting when it focuses on Julie’s film school education, which we recognize as the genesis of Hogg’s own cinematic journey, and the inspiration for this picture. It’s less compelling, unfortunately, during its primary narrative focus, the toxic relationship between Julie and Anthony. However formative the impetus for this relationship might have been for Hogg, its depiction on screen is vexing, giving us an inadequate feeling for what magnetizes this young woman to this condescending fop. Their amour mal is tediously drawn out by the film’s frequently leaden airlessness. Yet it is hard to deny what this all likely means to its maker, as memoir, as release, as chronicle of an ongoing self-creation. Even if we remain outside of it, The Souvenir at least suggests what it feels like on the inside.