In a distinguished career marked by multiple award nominations and wins – including two Oscars – actor Cate Blanchett adds another hypnotic, utterly engrossing performance to her formidable body of work with her latest effort. In TÁR, Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, a virtuoso conductor and musician in her own right, and the first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. With all that power, wealth, and fame comes the tempting ability to abuse it, and Blanchett’s fictional Lydia Tár suffers a complete breakdown when her abuses are made public.
Blanchett’s performance is intense and unrelenting in a movie that shares those same qualities, but writer/director Todd Field’s psychologically fraught character study keeps us at a frustrating remove from Lydia Tár, even as we see her come undone. TÁR is a movie that uses current hot-button societal issues like cancel culture, the #metoo movement, and abusing institutional power as window dressing to explore an emotional and psychological crisis. It offers no solutions to these issues, never so much as takes an ideological stance in the face of them. While that kept me at arm’s length from TÁR – enough so that I never fully fell under the picture’s sway – Field constructs a nuanced and complicated portrait of his troubled protagonist that is compelling.
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It took Gaspar Noé almost dying to transform his usually grim and nihilistic take on life into something wholly new with Vortex, the director’s seventh feature film. Well, maybe not wholly new. His latest is still grim and nihilistic, but there is an empathy present that boarders on humanistic. That’s a quality that might seem antithetical to describing Noé’s work, but what appears in only trace amounts – and only if you’re really engaging with his films – in previous of the director’s titles like Enter the Void and Climax takes an uneasy spotlight in Vortex, even as it works alongside Noé’s more signature preoccupations like dread and terror.
In early 2020, the Paris-based Argentine filmmaker, who is 58 years old, suffered a near fatal brain hemorrhage which ultimately helped inspire the story for Vortex. The opening line of text for the film, “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts,” leaves no doubt as to what’s on Noé’s mind with this picture.
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All I want to do is praise Top Gun: Maverick for being a slick and entertaining thrill-ride of a movie. It certainly is that. The action sequences are completely enthralling. The performances are mostly a lot of fun, too. Put all that together with the unrivaled screen magnetism of Tom Cruise – on the cusp of turning 60, Cruise still has plenty of charisma to burn – and Maverick should be a lock as the blockbuster action spectacle of the summer.
It undoubtedly will be.
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King Richard is a tidy movie. It hits every basic beat you expect an underdog sports movie to hit. There’s adversity and struggle followed by determination and the beginning signs of success before a climactic test of will and talent as the grand finale. Like another soaring sports movie with an unexpected ending – think of a sport that’s fallen out of favor in modern times – how the characters react when things don’t go as planned is what gives the picture its true strength and inspiration.
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Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is an absolute delight. The spell it casts is more hypnotic than that of the original film version, which won the award for Best Picture at the 34th Academy Awards. This new version has also been nominated for Best Picture, and knowing Hollywood’s regard for its own history and mythological status, I wouldn’t be surprised if West Side Story is the Best Picture winner at the 94th Academy Awards as well.
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“You must endure your sorrow,” Sonya, the niece of the titular character, tells her uncle in Anton Chekhov’s moving play, Uncle Vanya. The characters in Drive My Car are enduring their own sorrow. Unlike the bleak worldview of Uncle Vanya, though, which works brilliantly as a text-within-the-text to comment upon and enhance the story in Drive My Car, the characters do more than simply endure. The film is a meditation on finding human connection in the hardest circumstances. It’s filled with the beauty of the human spirit.
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I was an easy mark for Belfast. Kenneth Branagh’s self-described “most personal” film – it’s semiautobiographical, based on the actor/director’s childhood in Belfast during the Troubles – makes a clever juxtaposition about religion in its opening minutes that won me over. In voice-over, we hear Pa, the father of our nine-year-old protagonist, Buddy, speaking to another adult. “I have nothing against Catholics, but it’s a religion of fear.” Cut to Buddy and his family attending their regular Protestant worship service. The preacher is lambasting his parishioners, admonishing them that if they don’t choose the righteous path when it comes to God’s love, they will burn and suffer for all eternity.
This atheist appreciated Branagh’s wry observation about Irish Catholics and Protestants having more in common in their respective faiths than they imagine.
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CODA, at times, feels like it’s the product of a screenwriting algorithm rather than that it was written by an actual human being. The movie hits every emotional storytelling beat you would expect an Inspiring and Uplifting Dramedy to hit. That criticism aside, director Sian Heder – who wrote the screenplay – is able to conjure some magic from her familiar and well-worn overcoming adversity scenario. Most of that magic is down to the wonderful and inclusive cast.
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Whenever possible, I like to practice guided meditation. I don’t do it nearly as often as I’d like. Either the busyness of the day gets me, or I’m too tired by the time I realize I haven’t done it yet, or often it’s because I’m too lazy. I was reminded how much I miss meditation after experiencing Memoria, the latest movie from Thai filmmaker and visual artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Watching the film – if you’re able to fall into its languid rhythm – is like meditation or even like succumbing to a trancelike state.
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The greed, duplicitous plotting, double crossing, and murder in Fargo make that film feel like a Shakespearian tragedy, so, in retrospect, it seems obvious that the Coens would tackle the Scottish play, one of the Bard’s most famous and celebrated works.
Only, for the first time in their filmmaking lives, The Tragedy of Macbeth isn’t a collaboration between the Coen brothers. After nearly four decades of making movies together, The Tragedy of Macbeth is the first solo film by Joel Cohen. His stripped down, almost ascetic, version of the Shakespeare work is, simply put, a masterpiece.
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If you’re looking for something, anything, to lift your spirits out of the sewer that is our current moment and forget for 108 precious minutes that there is a raging plague all around us, look no further than the best film of 2021, Mike Mills’s newest effort, C’mon C’mon.
But don’t misunderstand me in thinking the movie is all rainbows and puppy dogs. Here you will experience sadness – in the form of a pulsing melancholy that Mills has mastered – frustration, and even, in moments, hopelessness. The messiness of human existence ensures that the bad must come with the good. That good, though, the transcendent wonder that sometimes briefly reveals itself as part of being a human on planet Earth, is achingly beautiful. Mills captures it in a most sublime way in C’mon C’mon.
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Though very different in story and theme, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza is destined to play on a double bill in repertory theaters and stoners’ home theaters alongside Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Both films are fantastic examples of the hangout movie: light on plot, heavy on atmosphere, these are movies that are more about an aimless, meandering pace and watching the characters simply be and not necessarily do. Tarantino himself coined the term to describe perhaps the first ever hangout movie, Rio Bravo.
Other examples include Fast Times at Ridgemont High and American Graffiti – Anderson has credited both as major inspirations for Licorice Pizza – as well as Anderson’s own Boogie Nights and Magnolia.
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As with his 2016 film, Jackie, director Pablo Larraín has crafted another emotionally charged fable centered around a powerful woman and the impossible circumstances in which she finds herself. I use the word fable to describe Spencer because that’s how the movie describes itself in its opening seconds. “A fable from a true tragedy,” are the words we see as the movie begins. It’s a clever way for Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight to immunize themselves from charges of historical inaccuracy.
The word fable also readies Spencer’s audience for something fantastical. Larraín has made a biopic by way of psychological horror here; his picture attains an emotional truth by tying its point of view to the heavily subjective mental and emotional state of its protagonist, Diana, Princess of Wales.
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Child Grooming is a fitting alternate title for Red Rocket. In at least one interview piece focused on Sean Baker’s new film, the director is described as “playing with fire” when it comes to the subject matter of the movie. In 2017, Baker directed my number one film of the year, The Florida Project. I praised that movie for practicing radical empathy. In my description of The Florida Project for my top ten list of that year, I stressed that “we have a duty to look after each other. And yes, even when we don't agree with someone's life choices. Yes, even when we think they don't deserve it. No one deserves to live on the fringes of our society because they don't have enough of the only thing we seem to care about: money.”
Baker and his frequent writing partner, Chris Bergoch, test the limits of the radical empathy I singled out in my praise for The Florida Project. It’s like Baker wanted to know if I, personally, would grant the same empathy to an abuser, someone who will use anyone to get what he wants. Baker does it for laughs in a movie that focuses on a 40-something-year-old man harnessing every ounce of his charm to convince a 17-year-old girl to run away with him so they can make a fortune together in porn.
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It’s serendipitous that I came across the film Passing when I did. I happened to screen it as I’m almost half way through a staggering book about race – and so much more – in America by Isabel Wilkerson titled Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I’ve been making my way through Caste for about two months now. I’m a notoriously slow reader, and I’ve found myself only able to read so much of this particular book in one sitting. Wilkerson includes gut-wrenching, disturbing examples of the rigid hierarchical system in place in America to keep Black people at the bottom of society, known as a caste system.
The serendipity comes in one text informing and unlocking nuance in the other. It’s easier to recognize, because of what I’ve read in Caste, that everything you see and hear in Passing is a result of white supremacy. The very idea that some members of the subordinated – read: Black – group could gain the privileges and respect of the dominant – read: white – group because their skin is light enough to pass for a white person speaks to the ugly and destructively nonsensical idea of white supremacy and using skin color as a way to asses human worth.
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The subtitle of The French Dispatch could have been: Wes Anderson makes me feel bad about myself. Modern (useless) Facebook meme pop-psychology would tell me that no one but me is responsible for the way I feel about myself. And yet. As someone who tries to move through the world with a reputation of being a cinephile, it took me watching about 20 minutes of Mr. Anderson’s new film to realize (as I do when I watch any of the director’s other films) how little I really know about this art form that I claim to cherish.
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The radiant and talented actor Jessica Chastain probably saw a certain little gold statue in her future when she bought the rights in 2012 to Tammy Faye Bakker’s life story. There’s nothing the Academy loves more in a best performance category than an actor radically altering her or his appearance for a role: Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull; Charlize Theron as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster; Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Oscar really loves it when beautiful people are perceived as uglying themselves up for a role.
Chastain certainly fits the bill with her performance as disgraced televangelist Bakker in the dramedy The Eyes of Tammy Faye. The phosphorescent makeup and wild hair styles that were Bakker’s trademarks make Chastain practically unrecognizable – especially in the latter parts of the film.
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The late-career renaissance that Paul Schrader started with his 2018 film First Reformed continues with his new picture, The Card Counter. The two movies have quite a bit in common; they work well as companion pieces. Both feature sparse storytelling techniques. While First Reformed is a purer example of slow cinema, The Card Counter certainly fits the transcendental filmmaking mold.
Schrader has a decades-long career obsession with examining psychologically broken protagonists seeking redemption and absolution. Both First Reformed and The Card Counter tackle systemic failures of society as a way into their main characters’ psyches. In First Reformed, it was climate change. In The Card Counter, it’s the United States government and military’s unconscionable orchestration of torture in the so-called “war on terror” of the Bush years.
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It would be facile to draw some kind of straight line directly from Charles Foster Kane to Donald John Trump. It’s probably been done in countless other essays after Trump ascended to the presidency as 2017 was getting under way. Beyond being facile, it’s almost certainly not true. That’s because the lesson at the heart of Citizen Kane, the kernel which blossoms into a mighty oak as the film unfolds, is that, as a character says of Kane during the movie, “No one word can describe a man’s life.” You can extrapolate that out into the idea that no person, famous or not, scoundrel or not, is one single thing.
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Let me tell you a story. Have you heard of the Broadway musical Hamilton? Of course you have. Well, the guy who created it and launched a phenomenon wrote another musical before he set the world on fire with Hamilton. It was called In the Heights, and it was also a success, running a little under three years for 1,184 performances on Broadway. After having seen the touring version of Hamilton, the filmed version of the Broadway production – the world is waiting for a proper movie version – and listening to the cast recording on repeat (my wife fell in love with it when the show really caught fire in 2016), I felt I had a handle on what creator Lin-Manuel Miranda is all about. After seeing the film adaptation of In the Heights, that assessment is confirmed. LMM is a champion of unabashed optimism and joy.
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