German director Christian Petzold has put his spin on the centuries-old tale of the undine – pronounced uhn-deen-ah in German; uhn-deen in English – with his new tragic romance. If you aren’t familiar, undines are elemental spirits associated with water, almost exclusively portrayed as female. The legend goes that in order to gain an immortal soul, an undine must marry a human. If the human falls in love with another, the undine must kill him and return to the water. Hans Christian Andersen, and, as we all know, Disney, tweaked the tale with The Little Mermaid. Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan also made a version of the myth in 2009, titled Ondine, starring Colin Farrell.
I haven’t really spoiled anything for you with that first paragraph. After all, the main character’s name is Undine, which is more popular as a name in Europe than in the U.S., and she announces the curse hanging over her within the first five minutes of the picture. In the first scene, we find out that Undine’s love, Johannes, has fallen for someone else. Undine warns him, “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you.” But then an interesting thing happens; she doesn’t kill Johannes. Instead, she meets and falls in love with Christoph.
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There’s a chilling moment late in the indie movie Test Pattern that acts as its thesis statement. It’s a flashback to before the day-or-so period that makes up the bulk of the movie. In the scene, Renesha and Evan, the couple at the center of the story, are reading in the back yard when Renesha notices Evan looking at her. When she asks what he’s thinking, Evan, a tattoo artist, tells Renesha he’s thinking about what he’s “going to design next and brand on you; because you’re mine.” She smiles and responds, “I’m yours.” The actor playing Evan, Will Brill, plays the scene with a hint of aw-shucks awkwardness. You get the feeling Evan thinks he’s being sweet, but the ominous background score, as well as what we’ve seen Renesha go through in the past hour of the movie, makes him appear in this moment as anything but sweet.
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A great amount of ink has already been spilled about the incredible performances from Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman in The Father. There’s good reason for that. Hopkins received his sixth Oscar nomination, including one win for the iconic rendering of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, for his portrayal as an octogenarian battling dementia. This is Colman’s second nomination after winning an Oscar in 2019 for her work in The Favourite. Both nominations are richly deserved. But what struck me about The Father, the debut film from director Florian Zeller, based on his own 2012 stage play, is the audacious storytelling.
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With this entry in my 100 Essential Films series, I’m now a tenth of the way through the list. (If you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here.) At this rate, I should be finishing the project up sometime around 2039… As Jack Nicholson once said, “So much to do, and so little time.”
Film number ten is a movie about the Great Depression made while it was still very much happening. Although FDR’s New Deal policies had started to turn things around in America, the country had not yet entered World War II in 1940, and the economic precarity of a huge swath of the American people (as I note in the review, the more things change, the more they stay the same) was the main concern of the country.
The novel The Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books of all time. I was introduced to it by one of the best teachers I had in high school, Terry Taylor, who taught American History. I’m happy to say that the movie mostly does the book justice. For this screening, I rented Wrath through Amazon Prime. The transfer looks great; Gregg Toland’s beautiful black-and-white cinematography is stunning. He shot the movie a year before his seminal work on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.
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Judas and the Black Messiah is like a drink of water after days in the desert. It exists and was made to upend the kind of fascistic patriotism that demagogues like Donald Trump and the recently departed Rush Limbaugh wallow in like so many pigs in shit. While their ilk pushes a cretinous version of history that worships power and the violence that flows from that power, truth-tellers like director Shaka King and screenwriters Will Berson and the Lucas brothers are making art that exposes state-sanctioned terror.
King has also made a riveting morality tale about loyalty and betrayal within a revolutionary movement. His picture is incendiary and features performances from two of the best actors working today, Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield. Kaluuya and Stanfield’s performances couldn’t be more different, but they are both wonders to behold, each in their own way.
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Director Chloé Zhao’s inspired blurring of truth and fiction in her newest film Nomadland reveals an emotional truth about the American spirit that is more profound than even the most probing documentary could capture. Her movie, in its own quiet way, celebrates the beauty and grandeur of American western landscapes and the human desire to drink them in, much like Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. It also documents, like a modern-day Grapes of Wrath, the crushing poverty that forced these beauty-seekers on the road in the first place. It’s the blending of these two aesthetics that make Nomadland such a delicate treasure.
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It’s an exciting, confusing, and scary time to be a film lover. Director Steve McQueen has decided to hasten the blurring of the already very fuzzy line between cinema and television with his Small Axe anthology of films. He’s done it with the help of a global pandemic. McQueen began working on the idea for Small Axe as early as 2010, and he had the project in some form of development since 2012. Originally conceived as a more conventional television series for the BBC, McQueen realized that he had enough material to make five distinct, standalone movies.
When the premier of the first picture in the series, Mangrove, was cancelled because of the 2020 Cannes film festival shutdown in the spring, due to COVID, the director decided to try a hybrid approach to distribution. Small Axe would run on BBC One, as originally planned, but it was also featured in the fall at the virtually held 2020 New York Film Festival. The film community got a collective case of the vapors trying to decide how to classify Small Axe. Is it television? Is it cinema? After seeing Mangrove – and being highly anxious to visit the rest of the films in the series – I am coming down firmly in the camp of, “when the movie is this damn compelling and well-made, who the hell cares what you call it?”
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The emotional exuberance of Minari is exemplified in a scene midway through the film. The Korean-American Yi family have made their way to rural Arkansas from California. The father, Jacob, has bought a huge plot of land with the dream of starting a farm in order to grow Korean vegetables to sell in surrounding urban centers with large Korean immigrant populations. He will save money by digging his own well for irrigation, avoiding using the county water supply or paying an exorbitant fee to a local “water dowser” who promises to be able to divine a water source using his dowsing rod. Jacob is skeptical at best, believing the man is little more than a con artist.
Instead, Jacob uses his brain, explaining to his five-year-old son David that water is likely to be in a down-hill location, close to trees. They pick the most likely spot and start to dig. When they hit water, Jacob yells in triumph at his success. Little David mimics his father. The two go back and forth shouting at the top of their lungs in celebration. It’s an ecstatic moment for the Yis and for us.
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“Power just means a world where we’re safe to be ourselves.”
That’s a quote in the film One Night in Miami… from the character Muhammad Ali – more accurately, Cassius Clay, as the story takes place on the eve of the legendary boxer converting to Islam and changing his name. What power means to the Black community, and the best way to obtain it, is the preoccupation of both the film and the four iconic real-life figures at its center. The movie is all about power, both in the Black community and among these four characters, who would all shape the world in their own ways. It’s a gripping character study that addresses the ongoing struggle of the Black movement to secure that basic sense of safety that Ali is talking about.
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Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is destined to be remembered as the final screen appearance of the immensely talented, gone-way-too-soon Chadwick Boseman. The actor, who died in August of 2020 at the age of 43, from colon cancer, is absolutely electric in the roll of Levee Green, a trumpet player in the titular character’s band. Boseman’s performance is a testament to his formidable acting abilities and a stinging reminder of what we’ve all lost.
Aside from Boseman’s performance, there are numerous other pieces of the puzzle that make Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom a superb, taut, devastating film. The formidable presence of Viola Davis, as Ma Rainey, is one. The assured direction of George C. Wolfe is another. The powerful words and ideas of playwright August Wilson is one more.
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“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression.”
So says Herman J. Mankiewicz early in the biopic about his greatest professional achievement, writing the screenplay for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. In Mank, that’s precisely what director David Fincher does with Mankiewicz. Here was a man of principle, Fincher shows us. Here was a man of character. Here was a drunk, an inveterate gambler, but above all, here was a man with an absolute conviction in what he believed.
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The uninspired comedy Buffaloed takes a handful of gags and uses them over and over again to fill its feature length. The way the locals of Buffalo, NY speak is one of those gags. They way they look is another. And that’s really about it. The classic film Fargo also pokes fun at the way its characters speak. But there’s so much more under the surface of that film. Buffaloed is a one-note comedy that ends up feeling disposable.
Set in Buffalo, NY, the debt-collection capital of the world, Peggy Dahl is determined to be successful and break out of the chain of poverty in which she was raised. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother pays the bills (just barely) by running an unlicensed beauty salon out of her house. (Ten cent wing night at the local bar – this is Buffalo, remember – helped keep Peg and her brother fed on their mother’s tight budget when they were growing up.)
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Even if Sound of Metal weren’t one of the best, most emotionally pulverizing cinema experiences of the year, the outstanding lead performance from Riz Ahmed would be reason enough to praise the film. The English actor/rapper/activist’s incredibly rich performance comes down to the level of interiority that Ahmed is able to convey to us. Through nuanced looks and gestures, most often conveyed with no words at all, Ahmed accomplishes with his character, Ruben, one of the most noble goals of the arts: the ability of the audience to truly see the world through someone else’s eyes.
Ruben Stone is a drummer in the two-piece metal band Blackgammon. His romantic and artistic partner, Lou (short for Louise), plays guitar and sings. A recovering heroin addict, Ruben is faced with a life-upending situation when he suddenly and almost completely loses his hearing due to the nightly abuse of Blackgammon’s metal shows.
It’s a simple setup – almost high-concept: the elevator pitch might be, “Metal drummer loses his hearing overnight and must face radically changing his life in order to adjust.”
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There’s a risk in adapting a play for the screen. The typically confined nature of the source material can lead to a stage bound feel in the movie. That locked, static aesthetic is anathema to an art form that’s known, after all, as motion pictures. (Take a look at many movies made in the wake of noisy, bulky sound equipment being introduced to the process in the early 1930s if you don’t believe me. The worst of them look like filmed plays.) One of the best examples of a director and movie that thrillingly breaks free of the source material’s stage roots is Miloš Forman’s dazzling Amadeus. Chicago, too, adds a cinematic spectacle feel to its musical number sequences.
Joe Mantello’s adaptation of playwright Mart Crowley’s seminal LGBTQ melodrama The Boys in the Band only breaks free of the source material’s stagy feel in a few key sequences. Each time it happens is thrilling; it injects the wider world into the hermetically sealed one of the story. While the rest of the movie could have easily taken place on a stage, Boys has plenty more going for it to make it an electric experience.
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Aaron Sorkin’s sophomore effort in the director’s chair – after 2017’s Molly’s Game – is just as compelling, erudite, and masterful as his first. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is one of the best movies of the year so far. All of Sorkin’s strengths are on display here. His screenplay is brimming with his signature style of crackling dialog. He examines with nuance and complexity mature themes like patriotic dissent, justice, and what makes American democracy function. His characters are all fully fleshed out people, not merely two-dimensional dialog delivery devices.
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The Julie Taymor who directed the electric films Titus, Frida, and, yes, even Across the Universe – a movie which wasn’t well received by most critics, but which really worked for me – shows up a little over an hour into her latest effort, The Glorias, the biopic about journalist and activist Gloria Steinem.
There are Taymor flourishes in the meandering first 70 minutes of the picture, to be sure. The film opens with a sequence in which an older version of Steinem – four actresses play the iconic feminist throughout The Glorias – looks out the window of a Greyhound bus as it rolls along the highway. Steinem and everything inside the bus are in black and white, everything outside the bus is in full color. It sets an interesting aesthetic that doesn’t pay off until Steinem finds her fiery passion for the Women’s Liberation movement. That’s when the movie really starts to rip.
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Not since Darren Aronofsky’s mother! in 2017 has a movie so successfully and hauntingly evoked an oneiric state as Charlie Kaufman’s fever dream vision I’m Thinking of Ending Things. If I were a more clever writer, I might invent a Kaufmanesque conversation between the two filmmakers, in which Aronofsky calls to praise Kaufman’s idiosyncratic and disturbing new work of art. Since I’m not that clever, you’ll have to settle for a more standard review in which I praise Kaufman’s unique vision while also wrestling with a few of the picture’s shortcomings.
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Ellis Martin hates his job. He hates his roommate’s girlfriend. He hates almost everything about his life. Sunday afternoons for Ellis are spent getting wasted as a way to cushion the blow of another work-week on the horizon. His dull 9-to-5 consists of dusting, vacuuming, and scrubbing toilets for a cleaning service. Ellis applies for other jobs in the hopes of finding something better – something he can live with – but even this seems futile.
That might be a good opening act for a story, but the description above is essentially the whole of independent filmmaker Shaun Rose’s hour-long film Upstate Story. There are no subplots, beyond a flashback sequence about one of Ellis’s ex-girlfriends. The movie suffers from solipsism, with no meaningful dialog coming from any character other than Ellis. Defying a cardinal rule of cinema – show, don’t tell – the entirety of Ellis’s dialog is delivered in voice over, making Upstate Story a kind of visual novel.
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Think of Kelly Reichardt’s new film First Cow as a spiritual cousin and companion piece to P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. The films are about the American dream on the western frontier in the early 1800s (Cow) and the early 1900s (Blood). There Will Be Blood is about the American dream run amok on greed and unchecked success; it’s the story of an oil tycoon told on an epic scale. First Cow focuses on, essentially, a small business owner who goes out of business before ever striking it rich – if you’ve seen the film, you’ll get the irony of my putting it that way. It’s a tale of American entrepreneurial spirit on the smallest, most personal scale.
That’s not to suggest there are no dramatic stakes (pun intended) in First Cow. The contemplative pace of Reichardt’s film and the languorous nature of her camerawork both belie the story’s dramatic tension.
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The most striking thing about The Assistant is its utter lack of sensationalism. Director Kitty Green’s fiction-film debut – the Aussie filmmaker has focused on documentaries until now – is a #MeToo movement/post-Weinstein reckoning that focuses not on monstrous acts of depravity, but mundane workday events. It also details the insidious protection of power that allows for abuse to happen.
The film can work as a sort of litmus test. This is a movie that is far removed from the sort of sickening specifics of Harvey Weinstein’s predations as detailed in dozens of news stories. For a viewer who isn’t paying close attention, for one who doesn’t understand how a toxic work culture operates, one could think nothing that happens in the movie is all that disturbing. That’s the real horror of Green’s picture and what makes it so effective. It’s the quiet things, the knowing jokes and the looking-the-other-way, that keeps real accountability from happening.
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