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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As with his previous films The Big Short and Vice, director Adam McKay’s insufferably smug tone, and a level of nuance that’s about as subtle as a piano falling from a third-story window, make his climate change satire, Don’t Look Up, virtually ineffective. His film also suffers from being overstuffed; it careens from one ridiculous scenario to the next with wildly uneven results.
I need to add the same disclaimer that I appended to my review for Vice – and, for that matter, The Big Short; it seems this will be a running theme for my reactions to McKay films going forward. I whole-heartedly agree with the point McKay is making and the urgency with which he’s making it. But the way he’s chosen to go about it is the worst example of holier-than-thou preaching-to-the-choir sanctimony. It undercuts his own goals.
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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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With Nightmare Alley, virtuoso director Guillermo del Toro has added neo-noir, alongside gothic horror, fantasy, and science fiction, to the growing list of genres he’s proven mastery over. His fidelity to the gritty, nihilistic films noir, made popular after WWII and featuring broken protagonists who play fast and loose with society’s mores – and often get brutally punished for it – almost doesn’t need the “neo” qualifier. Nightmare Alley is the closest rendering of an actual film noir made in the 21st century thus far. At the same time, Del Toro puts his distinctive stamp on the film, blending in flourishes of straight horror and devastating morality tale.
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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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In The Power of the Dog, New Zealand director Jane Campion has crafted a searing examination of masculinity and the societal expectations that come along with that word, all set against a stunning western landscape. When, in voiceover narration, a character asks in the opening seconds of the film, “For what kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother? If I did not save her,” he’s asking the central question of the film. What kind of men does our society produce, and why?
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I’ve been doing this for seven years, but still, each and every time I sit down in front of the keyboard to wrestle with my thoughts and feelings on a movie, it’s a challenge. I’m pouring everything I have into it, each and every time. Sometimes the results are fruitful. Sometimes I walk away thinking I never really got to the heart of what I wanted to explore. I think that means it’s working.
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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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If the original Matrix trilogy is about revelation and discovering your true purpose, The Matrix Resurrections is about the malaise of middle-age, of knowing you still have something to offer the world even though you’ve forgotten what the vitality of youth feels like. It also explores the idea that humanity will only reach its true potential when we build and nurture a pluralistic society. There’s also the idea that our love for one another gives us our true power; it motivates us to be our best selves.
The Matrix Resurrections is all that and much more. It possesses all of the hallmarks I’ve come to expect from any fantastical tale crafted by the Wachowski sisters, although one of the sisters, Lilly, wasn’t involved in this fourth installment of the Matrix franchise. Resurrections is raucously larger-than-life and messy in that uniquely human way that comes when our passions, emotions, and intellect swirl together.
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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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History, film history, and movies swirled for me into an intoxicating and irresistible event on November 22nd, 2021 at the Texas Theatre. That’s the movie house located on Jefferson Ave. where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested shortly after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
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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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Marvel Cinematic Universe mastermind Kevin Feige’s style and design for the look and feel of the content he produces for his Disney overlords has calcified with his latest entry, Eternals. I use the dreaded word content – it’s a word that makes me throw up in my mouth a little; it’s more at home in a marketing meeting than discussions about art or entertainment – because that’s what Eternals feels like, rather than a story or a movie.
At an interminable 157 minutes, it’s an attempt at entertainment that bolsters Martin Scorsese’s assertion that Marvel movies are more theme park attraction than storytelling. Even as a 200-million-dollar rollercoaster, Eternals is lifeless and largely joyless. The only fun thing about it is a few of the performances where a human spark peaks through the calculatedness of it all.
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Iconic director Todd Haynes’s first documentary feature is a florid chronicling of an iconic band and larger artistic movement that was responsible for dissolving the line between so-called low-art and high culture. In The Velvet Underground, Haynes uses every tool at his disposal to transform what might have been a fairly conventional narrative arc into an artistic experience that approximates the environment that his subjects conjured in their own work.
The Velvet Underground is the story of a band every bit as influential as The Beatles who also worked in uncharted artistic waters. Revelatory interviews with surviving members John Cale and Maureen "Moe" Tucker, as well as dozens of other artists active in The Velvet Underground’s time and place in history, bring the band’s initial ten-year creative period – the mid-1960s to the mid- ‘70s – to vibrant life.
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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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I’ll start my review of Dune: Part One by using one epic fantasy tale to comment on another. In The Waste Lands, the third book of Stephen King’s sprawling Dark Tower series, Roland, the hero from another world, asks to hear stories from the Wizard of Oz books. His response when asked why is, “The quickest way to learn about a new place is to know what it dreams of.” Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of author Frank Herbert’s serpentine 1965 novel Dune dreams of a pitiless, insatiable greed for power and riches, colonialist subjugation of marginalized societies, and a savior who promises to right all. Fifty-five years after the publication of the source material, Villeneuve’s stunning translation of Dune for the screen shows that whether it be 2021, 1965, or 1065, humanity’s preoccupations haven’t changed much.
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The five-film arc of Daniel Craig’s stint as Agent 007 comes to a close in the emotionally satisfying, if overstuffed, finale No Time to Die. The movie, the release of which became as dramatic as its plot due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has storytelling stakes and an emotional weight like no Bond film that’s come before it. It also has approximately 1,438 moving parts and, at a whopping 163 minutes, suffers from a bloat which threatens to, but thankfully never succeeds in, sabotaging its best elements.
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