To those who lived (and died) during the “war to end all wars,” it was anything but trivial. Forty million people (military and civilian combined) died as a result. Humanity experienced unimaginable suffering in the four+ years of a conflict that has mostly been relegated to dusty history books.
Swiss director Edward Berger has determined to make that suffering very imaginable and horrifically unforgettable with his adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal 1929 antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque was a veteran of WWI, and he relayed the horrors of what he saw in battle through his protagonist, the patriotic German Paul Bäumer. Three years into the conflict, Paul enlists with most of his high school classmates in order to defend the glory of his homeland.
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“I sell shit.”
That’s the key line in Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s brutally hilarious black comedy Triangle of Sadness. This is Östlund’s debut English-language film, and it won him a second straight Palme d'Or at Cannes, after 2017’s The Square. For this latest effort, Östlund – who wrote the screenplay, in addition to directing – skewers the super-rich with biting, merciless satire. Within the film’s eat-the-rich ethos, its flavor profile is enhanced with a liberal amount of mockery directed at the pitiless, transactional nature that extreme wealth breeds in every human encounter it infects.
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While The Way of Water is slightly less obnoxious than 2009’s Avatar, numerous Indigenous peoples tribes have blasted the appropriation of their cultures for entertainment, fun, and profit by a white filmmaker. As they did for the first film, these groups called for audiences to boycott the new installment. As you might have guessed, this call for a boycott from some of the most marginalized members of our society did not hinder the movie from making 2+ billion dollars (and counting) at the box office.
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The key moment in Baz Luhrmann’s latest cinematic maximalist bacchanal – about the one and only King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley – comes within the picture’s first five or ten minutes. The internet meme culture overlords got it immediately. It’s the scene, which became a viral sensation, of Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker being informed that the voice he’s hearing on the radio, Elvis singing That’s All Right, belongs to a white man. “He’s white…,” Hanks’s Parker says as if in a trance; it’s half-question, half-stunned-declarative-statement.
Col. Tom – who represented Presley from 1956 until the singer’s tragic death in 1977 and helped himself to over half of everything Elvis earned – is our (not so) humble narrator. He acknowledges that some will consider him “the villain of this here story.” Luhrmann let’s Col. Tom have his say, but he also uses his strong directorial hand to make sure we see the one-time carnie’s legacy of selfish and cruel behavior and the role it played in Elvis’s descent into addiction, despair, and, ultimately, death.
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My wife fell asleep while we were watching Aftersun. It was in no way the movie’s fault; she hadn’t slept well the night before and had struggled most of the day with drowsiness. Rae found it hard to believe me when I assured her that nothing bad, traumatizing, or depressing happens over the course of Scottish director Charlotte Wells’s quietly touching debut feature.
I wasn’t lying. Nothing worse than the loss of an expensive scuba mask and a few strained moments between a father and daughter appears on the screen. Nevertheless, Wells expertly crafts a sense of dread throughout Aftersun, often barely detectable, on the edges of the frame. Her film is a marvel of delicate restraint mixed with subtle, deep emotion.
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After eight years of writing film criticism and putting out these annual best-of lists, I’m making a major change. This year, and going forward, my top ten films of the year list (which is really a top 25) will no longer be ranked in a “best to least” format.
I’m doing this because of several different factors which, when I thought about them together, convinced me that it was time for a change…
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Damien Chazelle had a dream to fuse Singin’ in the Rain and Eyes Wide Shut, and, for our sins, that’s what he’s given us.
In preparation for this review, I came across a description of Babylon as drawing on “just enough real film history to flatter cinephiles and to risk their ire.” I couldn’t have put it any better myself.
Chazelle’s epic three-hour+ ode to the birth of Hollywood as a cultural phenomenon – holding sway now for a century – is by turns brilliant, exuberant, self-indulgent, exhausting, and ultimately flattens out the history of the artform Chazelle clearly cherishes. The writer/director is also so focused on giving us the spectacle and bacchanal of the last days of silent film that he forgot to write characters or a story.
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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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What Questlove did last year for a single music festival with his documentary Summer of Soul, film and cultural critic Elvis Mitchell has done for an entire decade of cinema and beyond with Is That Black Enough for You?!?, the first-time director’s new Netflix documentary.
With a focus on the 1970s, one of the greatest decades in American cinema by almost any measure, Mitchell succeeds wildly with Black Enough as a reclamation project for Black cinema of the era. His film is an erudite mix of interviews with numerous luminaries of the film and entertainment world – Harry Belafonte, Samuel L. Jackson, and Whoopi Goldberg are only a few – and incisive video essay-style film and cultural criticism from Mitchell.
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As you might imagine, a semi-autobiographical movie about one of the most respected and revered filmmakers ever produced by the Hollywood system is itself paying homage to the art form that birthed it. The pivotal sequence of The Fabelmans, in which the young protagonist Sammy Fabelman – based loosely on director Steven Spielberg’s own formative years – uncovers a family secret, is straight out of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 arthouse sensation Blowup. In that film, a photographer becomes convinced that he has captured a murder with his photography.
In The Fabelmans, Sammy has captured, through his obsessive moviemaking, his mother’s infidelity. As Sammy scrutinizes each frame, each stolen touch between his mother and Bennie, the man he thinks of as an uncle, he realizes that his idyllic family life is built on a lie.
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“For a minute. Just a minute. You made it feel like home.”
Those are the final words we hear in the last seconds of Bones and All, the new film from director Luca Guadagnino. With a quiet, contemplative score by duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, those words, sung by the Nine Inch Nails front man Reznor, cut right to the bloody, visceral heart of Guadagnino’s picture.
No matter what you hear about the movie – it features graphic violence and vivid depictions of cannibalism – its real power lies in capturing the almost ineffable experience of finding a sense of home, belonging, trust, and deep love in another human being. Bones and All is about finding in someone else that illusive sense of home in an inhospitable, cruel world.
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Men would rather chop off their own fingers than go to therapy. If you’re even a little familiar with internet meme culture, you’ve likely seen one of the hundreds of “men would rather [insert stupid or awful thing here] than go to therapy” memes, which chides the male sex for our almost absolute refusal to solve problems by talking through them.
Instead, we usually opt for violence or other reckless behavior that often leaves us worse-off than when we started. The characters in playwright and director Martin McDonagh’s latest film, The Banshees of Inisherin (pronounced Innish-E-rin), would do well to have the little bit of snarky wisdom posted to their Facebook page by a friend. McDonagh set his film in 1923, though, so his characters needn’t be bothered with any modern critiques of toxic male behavior.
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Every time I hear one of a select group of pop hits from the last 40 years, I start singing the wrong words. They might be lyrics about the Star Wars character Yoda, when the song is actually about a woman named Lola. They might be lyrics about making prank phone calls when the song is really about chasing waterfalls. Every time this happens – and I mean every. single. time. – my wife rolls her eyes and threatens to divorce me.
I will never stop, though, because I am a lifelong "Weird Al" Yankovic fan. My music collection contains every album from the most successful and famous parody-song artist of all time, save two. (The last one I obtained was 2006’s Straight Outta Lynwood, so I’m missing 2011’s Alpocalypse and 2014’s Mandatory Fun.)
All that to say I might not be the most impartial judge of a movie about – and co-written by – Yankovic. The new film, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, directed by comedy writer and filmmaker Eric Appel, in his feature debut, is an absolute hoot. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, since I was clearly in the tank for it from frame one, but Weird is the goofiest, most ridiculous, funniest comedy of the year.
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Executive produced by Bryan Fuller, Queer for Fear looks at queer representation in horror movies from the beginnings of cinema through roughly the 1990s. It covers everything from gay director James Whale’s outsized influence on the horror genre, via his seminal work for Universal Studios in the 1930s, to the Wachowski sisters exploring queer desire in 1996’s Bound.
Any person committed to understanding the world with as much complexity and nuance as possible craves ideas and perspectives other than their own. Queer for Fear gave this (mostly) straight guy a new perspective on dozens of cultural artifacts and made them richer and more interesting for it. It also validates and reclaims a vibrant history for people who have experienced intolerance, rejection, hostility, and violence from those in society – sad to say, probably still the majority – who can’t slap their hands over their ears fast enough when new ideas are presented to them. Queer for Fear is a wonderful achievement in queer cinema. Both LGBTQ+ and straight folks should relish the ideas it presents.
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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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With Moonage Daydream, documentary filmmaker Brett Morgen has reinvented the form, synthesizing a kaleidoscope of images and sounds from the life and work of David Bowie into a vibrant, electrifying experience. Like its subject’s nonconformist, taboo-smashing body of work, Morgen’s 140-minute tone poem meditation on one of the most sui generis artists who has ever lived is breathtaking in its scope and originality. Morgen’s film is one of the best of the year. David Bowie pulses in every frame, reminding us from beyond the grave that we’ll never see his like on this planet again.
Upon reflection, Moonage Daydream is (slightly) more conventional than it at first seems. Beneath the surface of the film’s elliptical, almost phantasmagorical tapestry is a roughly chronological examination of Bowie’s career over the course of about 30 years. This is the first documentary about the glam rock pioneer that is officially authorized by the estate of the artist, who died in 2016 from liver cancer.
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Return of the Jedi, the final chapter in the trilogy that transformed sci-fi movies forever, is itself a rehash of the plot of A New Hope. That, as well as a few other less-than-inspired elements of the picture, make Jedi the weakest of the first triptych of films.
Released in May of 1983, Jedi was the culmination of the previous six years of Star Wars fever. I was about to turn three years old, so, again, I had no cultural awareness at the time outside of the contents of my own diaper. I would like to pretend, however, that I took my brother – who was about to turn 18 months – to the movie while explaining everything he missed in the first two episodes.
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I had an absolute blast covering Fantastic Fest 2022. I’m writing this post-mortem to get the final stats on the record and to mention the standouts I saw that I haven’t proselytized yet.
By the numbers:
I saw 17 short films at the fest and 28 features, for a total of 45 titles over 7.5 days.
Here’s the breakdown by day:
Day 1: 2 features, 9 shorts
Day 2: 3 features, 1 short
Day 3: 3 features
Day 4: 4 features
Day 5: 4 features, 1 short
Day 6: 5 features, 1 short
Day 7: 3 features, 2 shorts
Day 8: 4 features, 3 shorts
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Me, upon waking up Saturday morning: “I could use a light entry into the screenings today. I hope the choice I made yesterday is kind of tame.”
Checks phone; sees first screening is titled Flesheater.
Also me: “Well, shit.”
Day three was the first day I didn’t leave the theater for the entire day, apart from stepping outside to get some fresh air between screenings. I arrived at 11am and didn’t leave until almost twelve hours later. One of the great things about a film festival at Alamo Drafthouse is access to a full menu for every screening, meaning you never have to leave to get food.
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I felt the lack of sleep I got after day one of the fest in my bones every single minute of day two. Because of it, I made a decision that will cause me to break the promise I made to you only 72 hours ago. I’m out on the midnight (or near midnight) screenings going forward. Threeish hours of sleep a night is simply not enough for me to function. Abandoning any plan or part of a plan always makes me feel a bit like a failure, but then I remembered something. This is supposed to be fun, damn it! Plus, no one is paying me to do this, hence no one is telling me what to do, hence I can make this experience anything I want it to be.
I saw five movies – three features and two shorts – on day two. After writing and publishing the post for day one, grabbing a shower, and heading back to Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, I was immediately treated to my favorite film of the fest so far.
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