I’ve definitely become more cynical in the decade since I started writing regular movie reviews. I’m sure of it after my reaction to seeing Jason Reitman’s new paean to the comedy institution known as Saturday Night Live. Reitman’s film, Saturday Night, is enjoyable enough as a peek behind the curtain at the madcap goings-on in the lead up to the first episode of what would become the longest running sketch comedy show in television history. It’s also cliché-ridden, offers practically zero insight into any of the characters, and features a made-to-order climax wherein everything magically falls into place at exactly the right moment. An exercise in subtlety, it is not.
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If ever there were a movie that exemplifies the recent viral social media phenomenon known as “Man or Bear,” in which women are asked if they would prefer to be alone in the woods with a man or a bear, it’s Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman of the Hour. If you’re unfamiliar, an overwhelming majority of women, when given the opportunity, would take their chances hanging out with a grizzly rather than risk possible violence at the hands of an unknown man. Stranger danger, indeed.
Kendrick, with the help of Ian McDonald’s focused screenplay, imagines the world in a way that I would assume looks very familiar to many, if not most, women. It’s a world in which women are subject to men’s relentless quest to get sex out of them. Female utility begins and ends with their bodies, and if a woman insists on using her own agency to upset the status quo, she risks incurring the anger, or worse, of a man.
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David Cronenberg ain’t got nothin’ on Coralie Fargeat. Cronenberg, the body-horror director who has been called the “King of Venereal Horror” and the “Baron of Blood,” has been namechecked by French director Fargeat – along with David Lynch, John Carpenter, and Michael Haneke – as influencing her work. With her latest picture, the giddily gory The Substance, Fargeat makes a convincing case that she’s ready to join, as a peer, the ranks of those she admires. Her film is as nasty as any Cronenberg, as bonkers as any Lynch, and is so horrifically hilarious that I often found myself laughing as I was wincing and looking away from the screen. The Substance is also a razor-sharp feminist satire about youth and beauty and how both are weaponized against women in our society.
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Legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola spent forty years trying to get Megalopolis, his sprawling, sci-fi epic fable about the Roman and American empires, made. Now 85, it might turn out to be the director’s last film. He waited about a decade too long for his examination of how and why empires crumble to be relevant. Maybe if he had made and released Megalopolis before Donald Trump’s infamous ride down that golden escalator, I would have praised his maximalist primal scream about our current cultural and political moment as visionary and prescient. Instead, what Megalopolis has on offer feels like a thin imitation of our nightmarish reality.
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I’m publishing this cri de coeur on October the fourth because I’m in Texas. Watching, pondering, and writing about movies from around the globe for the last decade has helped me come closer to the person I want to be: a citizen of the world who thinks hard about the human condition and understanding as many different perspectives within it as possible.
My past and current roots in Texas led me to publish this last plea to get yourself registered to vote for the upcoming US Presidential election. The last day to register to vote in the state of Texas is Monday, October seventh.
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The theme of this year’s It Came from Texas film festival was a celebration of the independent Texas spirit. Festival director Kelly Kitchens infused that theme not only into the movies she chose to screen, but into every aspect of the fest to create a wider celebration of Texas artists and their impact on the history and legacy of film.
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Unlike Luca Guadagnino’s last effort, the unforgettable cannibal romance road trip movie Bones and All, his new film, Challengers, has very little in the way of graphic violence. The closest it comes is a wrenching scene depicting a torn ACL during a tennis match. Still, the emotional and psychological stakes underpinning this tale of elite athletes, insatiable ambition, and a fraught love triangle proves again how deft Guadagnino is at foregrounding human connection – and the messy emotions that come with it – no matter the broader subject matter of the movie.
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The Bikeriders is, on the whole, enchanted by its subjects’ nihilism. Nichols’s deep curiosity about human behavior and his non-judgmental, empathetic artistic style makes his film about small-scale fascism an engrossing portrait of our endless capacity for love and hate.
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Alien: Romulus is a nepo movie. Like nepo baby – the original term I’m borrowing and adapting for this new cinematic designation – I’m using nepo movie to describe offspring that coasts into success (of the kind which those without the famous pedigree could only dream) on the sterling reputation of famous progenitors. We’ve had movies like this before, as we had children of the rich and famous using their connections to jump start a career before the invention of the term nepo baby.
What made this oh-so-clever turn of phrase spring into my mind was Romulus mimicking the best, most memorable elements from both mom and dad in its pursuit to build its own legacy. Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez wrote the screenplay for this seventh installment in the iconic sci-fi/horror franchise with his longtime collaborator Rodo Sayagues. His movie plays like a best-hits mashup of both Ridley Scott’s genre defining Alien and James Cameron’s sci-fi/horror-by-way-of-war-movie follow up Aliens, with a splash of Prometheus added in for good measure.
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There’s a very distinct difference between a movie shrouding itself in tantalizing mystery, so that the audience can fill in the blanks using their own imagination, and a movie being so opaque about its plot machinations that it’s indistinguishable from shoddy storytelling. German writer/director Tilman Singer’s second feature, Cuckoo, strives for the former, but, because of its confusing and nonsensical plot, lands squarely in the domain of the latter.
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I’m doing something a little different this week. Politics is invading my film criticism website for one very specific reason. I am of the firm belief that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, democracy is done for. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment, and if that means a politics interview inexplicably appearing on a website dedicated to movie reviews, so be it.
I’m a reader of the Substack newsletter Lone Star Left, published by Michelle Davis. Since she’s here in Dallas, I wanted to talk to Michelle in an effort to spread the word about her work and to discuss the state of both Texas and national politics. She graciously agreed, and the result is available here.
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Characters describing their dreams is a prominent part of Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest exercise in batshit what-the-fuckery. This salient feature of the picture – which the director cowrote with longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou – is so striking because to describe the movie itself is like telling someone upon waking about a series of dreams you had during the previous night. In Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos, the crown prince of Greek Weird Wave cinema, has crafted a movie that makes his last effort, the befuddling Poor Things, look like a classical Hollywood musical by comparison.
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And now, the thrilling conclusion of my OCFF 2024 adventures!
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The theme of Oak Cliff Film Festival (OCFF) 2024 – movies are all around us – fit with my experience of the fest. The opening night celebration launched with an endearing short film, shot by the OCFF crew, in which an escaped Wes Anderson character extols the virtues of seeing movies everywhere we look. (Full disclosure: Chris Gardner, the actor who portrays the quirky “filmthropoligist” in the short, is my across-the-street neighbor and runs PR for the fest.)
During the short, Dr. Ovie McClintock makes the classic director’s frame by putting his two thumbs and forefingers together to form a widescreen rectangle. In his world, inanimate objects on the street around the Texas Theatre create the "wild, undomesticated, feral cinema" all around us. He drolly asks a parking meter about its motivation, encourages a few newspaper vending machines on their outstanding performances, and tells us that even the giant cow sitting atop the local Charco Broiler Steak House is in on the magic. “That’s not a cow,” McClintock breathlessly intones, “that’s a character!”
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As the movie year rolls on, I’m excited to announce another first in my film festival adventures. It’s taken me almost ten years, but I’m finally covering my local neighborhood movie celebration as a critic. Taking place primarily at the legendary Texas Theatre, the Oak Cliff Film Festival (OCFF) is celebrating its 13th annual installment from June 20 through June 23, including dozens of screenings loaded with intriguing new titles, repertory screenings of cinema classics, multiple shorts blocks (including shorts from local Texas students), live shows, filmmaker workshops, and more.
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Dead fish are the most potent symbols within Godzilla Minus One to signify director Takashi Yamazaki’s successful attempt to reestablish the nuclear anxieties central to the original film in the franchise. Each time the colossal monster surfaces from the deep in Yamazaki’s movie, Godzilla is preceded by a collection of floating dead fish killed by his own poisonous radiation. In the wake of Oppenheimer – Christopher Nolan’s epic examination of humanity unlocking the horrific destructive power of the atom – and the recent threats of Russian madman Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons in his deranged pursuit of empire, a return to the original preoccupation of the 70-year-old kaiju franchise is sadly apropos.
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The echoes of the past that we hear in the opening minutes of Furiosa, which tell us why human society is but a memory, feel unsettlingly familiar. Pandemic. Runaway climate disaster and ecocide caused by human carbon emissions. Political instability and oppression. Gas wars. Water wars. Societal collapse. The first few minutes of the movie feel more like documentary than action spectacle. Here in the real world, our planet is dying and we’re literally running out of water; it feels like we’re all waiting for the proverbial dam to break.
What a fun and exciting topic for an escapist action blockbuster, right?
Turns out, in George Miller’s capable hands, that is right.
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Thirty minutes into the documentary Queendom, we see the film’s subject, Gena Marvin, writhing in a large performance space in nothing but thong underwear. A cut reveals a host of characters covered head-to-toe in shiny, latex-like material who are standing menacingly in front of Gena. Each of these suits – which, because they cover every inch of the performers’ bodies, are reminiscent of BDSM gear – is one of three solid colors. The colors consist of the three represented on the Russian Federation flag. Those colors happen to be red, white, and blue.
The next shot shows Gena staring above her directly into the camera. She is now surrounded by these patriotic figures, who encircle her in rings of the red, blue, and white suits. They jostle and envelop Gena, slowly pushing her down, swallowing her up from view of the camera. If you’re looking for a central metaphor for Queendom, you can’t do much better than this moment.
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After attending two Dallas International Film Festivals, I’ve discovered that one of the pleasures of a smaller fest is in connecting with the other movie lovers around me. One can certainly do the same at a gargantuan event like South By Southwest, but there’s a distinct difference. At SXSW, you might connect with a few people as you’re standing in line for a screening, or while in the theater before the show starts. Because of the thousands and thousands in attendance, however, there’s a good chance you might never see the same person twice over the course of the fest. That’s not the case at DIFF.
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When trying to set my lineup in the DIFF ticketing system, I learned that my press badge wasn’t authorized to reserve tickets, as is the case for other film festivals like Fantastic Fest and SXSW. After a few email exchanges, I was informed that paying customers were the priority, and that I would need to queue up in the waitlist line for any movie I wanted to see. But, as is often the case in my charmed life, a magnanimous benefactor swooped in and gifted me a regular badge so that I can bypass the waitlist line, making my odds of getting into each screening much better. Many thanks are owed to my Dickensian guardian angel who did me a solid. I am eternally grateful.
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