Nouvelle Vague

NOUVELLE VAGUE   ***

Richard Linklater

2025

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

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

Hamnet

HAMNET   **

Chloé Zhao

2025

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

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

The Plague

THE PLAGUE   ***1/2

Charlie Polinger

2025

IDEA:  At a water polo summer camp in 2003, a diffident boy becomes both victim and collaborator of his predatory peers. 

BLURB:  A dread-inducing coming-of-age thriller, The Plague makes the case that there’s perhaps no worse period in life than a boy’s early adolescence. It’s not exactly a novel perspective, but it’s one that first-time feature filmmaker Charlie Polinger vividly demonstrates in 90 supremely stressful minutes that should conjure a chilling wave of memories for males in the audience who survived middle school. Although the premise suggests body horror — and there is a fair amount of acned and scabbed skin — the film deemphasizes obvious puberty metaphors to instead locate its terror in the realm of the social. For Polinger, the physical awkwardness of pubescence is nothing compared to the toxic group behavior of a gaggle of preteen boys in a confined space. His superb cast of young actors, tasked with carrying the weight of a film almost entirely absent of adults, creates a pungently realistic homosocial atmosphere of taunting, posturing, and libidinal excess in which a timid boy like Everett Blunck’s Ben can never feel totally safe. Polinger compounds the sense of menace in Kubrickian tracking shots down the empty hallways of the community center and in reverberating sound design that combines underwater ambience with eerie non-diegetic vocalizations. Is The Plague perhaps overdetermined in its frequently logic-defying deluge of kid horrors? Probably, because seriously, where are the adults?? On the other hand, I think back to my own preteen years in school and remember a galling lack of checks on the most vicious of bullies. Polinger’s film doesn’t seek symbolic revenge on them, Carrie-style, but does something more uneasy by figuring adolescence as a sticky morass we just learn to muddle through, with the knowledge — or blind faith — we’ll emerge better on the other side.

Peter Hujar's Day

PETER HUJAR'S DAY   ***

Ira Sachs

2025

IDEA:  On December 19, 1974, journalist Linda Rosenkrantz visits photographer Peter Hujar in his Manhattan apartment and has him recount his previous day in minute detail for an audio recording.

BLURB:  As in many a postmodern work, Peter Hujar’s Day is most fascinating on the conceptual level, in this case as an experiment in archival reconstruction. Sachs’s premise is founded on multiple levels of translation and mediation across media and time: from the spoken words of Hujar and Rosenkrantz as recorded by audiotape in 1974 to a written transcript of the conversation, to a published book of that transcript and then to screenplay, and finally to a visual reenactment in which the words are embodied by actors in a physical space filled with ambient sounds and music. There is at once a documentary consciousness elicited here — the words we’re hearing are the actual words Hujar spoke over 50 years ago — and a pointed artifice, which Sachs underscores through meta-cinematic devices such as camera light leaks that punctuate scenes and, at one point, a sound crew and boom mic in the frame. One could likely just listen to Peter Hujar’s Day, as one could to Derek Jarman’s Blue, and be rewarded by Ben Whishaw’s and Rebecca Hall’s loving embodiments of their subjects’ voices, the way their timbres and cadences resurrect something of the lived experiences of the artists they play. But this is a film, after all, and Sachs fashions lissome images that reveal varied ways of depicting two people in what is essentially one small area. There is a casual dynamism here, from adjustments in blocking, shot scale and length, and movement to the change of light as the day wears on, sun projected on faces and walls in warm 16 mm. The formalism, at times, draws more attention than the words, but they are all of a piece in this wispy but striking film in which the technologies of memory are the very grounds of memory itself. 

Train Dreams

TRAIN DREAMS   ***

Clint Bentley

2025

IDEA:  A logger in the Pacific Northwest experiences love, brutality, and loss over several decades in the 20th century.

BLURB:  Grandness is nestled within the granular in Train Dreams, which conveys the inexorable passage of time and the toll of modernization through the prism of one man’s unexceptional existence. In just about 100 minutes, it channels some 80 years of personal and national history by homing in on the interstices. It’s these in-between moments that comprise the life of Robert Grainier, who drifts on the fringes of the industrial progress to which he contributes but sees little profit from. He’s as rootless as one of his newly felled trees, if not as old; history and nature happen around him, and he can be nothing more than a guilty witness to the former’s sins and a subject of the latter’s indifference. Joel Edgerton is incredibly moving as Grainier, even with the dubious aging makeup (or lack thereof). With his hangdog face and soulful, deep-set eyes, he imbues the character with a painful existential solitude that is in turn heightened by Will Patton’s Godlike narration of his life. But we are always reminded of the splendor in his world, and DP Adolpho Veloso captures it with palpable reverence, his camera gazing up at swaying old-growth trees or soaking in golden sunlight, perched by a warm fireside or showing family play against the yellow-purple hues of dusk. Bentley and Kwedar can’t resist some trite verbalizing of this sublimity, and the life-before-your-eyes montages are laid on rather thick in the final third. Still, Train Dreams is gorgeous and affecting, a requiem for, and hushed acceptance of, the transience of all things. 

The White Balloon

THE WHITE BALLOON   ****

Jafar Panahi

1995

IDEA:  A young girl in Tehran contends with a series of mishaps when she goes to buy a goldfish for the New Year. 

BLURB:  For a film so unassuming and small-scale, The White Balloon stands tall: in Iranian cinema, in child-centered cinema, in the art of nimble, concise yet expansive miniatures that communicate more in a minute than many films do in multiple hours. Every aspect of Kiarostami’s script and Panahi’s direction are precisely judged without once feeling effortful; the same can be said, even more miraculously, of seven-year-old Aida Mohammadkhani, who carries the film on her diminutive shoulders in a performance as large as life. Or as large as a child’s life, anyway, which is to say, huge: every emotion magnified, every step a mile, the simple task of buying a goldfish becoming a quest through a labyrinth of onerous obstacles. Panahi masterfully figures Razieh’s experience of the world through POV shots and subjective sound, expressing the magnitude of how she feels hurt, longing, frustration, curiosity, fear, hope, and so much more. At the same time, he adroitly balances her perspective with a more objective one of the adult reality she finds herself intrepidly navigating. Razieh may not understand it, but Kiarostami and Panahi lucidly show, in an accumulation of small details, a society structured by commerce and inequality, in which a child’s problems are no less important or reflective of that society for being so relatively minor. Her brave negotiations with both adults and youth set into relief the gendered, classed, aged, and ethnic boundaries that affect everyone, and that make the retrieval of a banknote from a sewer grate more than merely a physical challenge. Panahi’s articulation of the economy of urban space and time, his use of color (not for nothing does Razieh visually rhyme with her coveted white-and-orange fish), and his employment of near-constant chatter on the soundtrack come together to create a world bursting with activity, authenticity, and meaning. Even when Razieh accomplishes her mission, Panahi makes sure we know there are so many more to tackle.