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. 

A House of Dynamite

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE   ***1/2

Kathryn Bigelow

2025

IDEA:  Government officials at all levels scramble to stop a single nuclear missile heading toward the United States.

BLURB:  To use another explosives metaphor, A House of Dynamite is a ticking time bomb that never goes off, a doomsday thriller that holds the audience in a nerve-jangling suspension where the end may be in sight but it can never be (fore)seen. This is an existentialist premise Oppenheim and Bigelow boldly fit inside the trappings of a nuts-and-bolts government procedural, whose ostensible real-time elapsing is subverted through structural repetition. The nonlinear triptych storytelling, more than gradually layering in new perspectives and information, has the simultaneous effect of putting us in the shoes of various agents at a single, hasty moment of heart-racing danger and stretching out that moment into a condition of permanent uncertainty. There are about 20 minutes until possible nuclear armageddon, but there’s also that times three, or the nearly two hours of the film’s runtime, but really there’s an indefinite period of potentiality, and A House of Dynamite makes us queasily sit in it. As she does so well, Bigelow creates suspense through a sense of human control slipping away under our own massive apparatuses of power. Her vérité style, marked by Barry Ackroyd’s handheld camera and Kirk Baxter’s fast cutting, captures basically ordinary people negotiating the minutia of a situation that is anything but ordinary. Oppenheim’s script uses a clichéd shorthand to quickly humanize these people (uniformly by giving them spouses or kids), but it’s mostly bracing in how it conveys the impossibility of their professional decision-making, and the contingencies of bureaucracy, technology, and emotion that influence it. A House of Dynamite leaves us with the chilling reality (or is it insanity?) that our lines of defense are not nearly as powerful as our means of destruction.