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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I’m not sure if the title of the new film from Bradley Cooper, Maestro, is supposed to refer to the movie’s subject, legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, or to Cooper himself. Because make no mistake, Bradley Cooper is the definitive maestro in control here, and he wants you to know it; as with A Star is Born, Cooper’s debut behind the camera, the actor-turned-director is pulling double duty as both director and star. The results this time around are a decidedly more mixed bag.
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If you’re looking for the most self-assured, quietly transfixing debut feature of the year, look no further than director Celine Song’s contemplative Past Lives. I’m too old to describe her film as being “a vibe,” but that’s exactly what it is. Past Lives is like a series of emotions washing over the audience in waves. Song has taken autobiographical bits and pieces of herself to make an authentic, modern romance that feels hyper-specific to the immigrant experience and yet also universal to the human experience
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Writing in 2012 as chief film critic for British daily The Times, Kate Muir observed of Chariots of Fire, for its 30th anniversary re-release, that the Oscar Best Picture winner has “a simple, undiminished power,” and that it is “utterly compelling.” Chariots of Fire makes an appearance in a critical sequence in writer/director Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light. Set roughly between the fall of 1981 and the spring of 1982, Mendes’s film is a wonderfully realized character study following the lives of the employees at a seaside British cinema. In its own way, with more humble ambitions than the Olympian scope of Chariots of Fire, Empire of Light is also utterly compelling due to its own simple, undiminished power.
Set at the fictional Empire Cinema, Light mainly follows Hilary, a shift manager at the Empire, as well as the newly hired Stephen and the rest of the theater’s staff. A bond forms between the older Hilary and the younger Stephen, and the two engage in on-again/off-again sexual trysts. Over the course of the film, we discover that Hilary has been assigned her job by the government’s social services department. She struggles with mental health issues, possibly what would today be described as severe bipolar disorder.
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