After cutting my teeth on two out-of-town film festivals, I’m now covering one in my own back yard. The 17th Dallas International Film Festival opened last night and will run through the fifth of May. Centered in Dallas’s West Village, in the heart of Uptown’s entertainment district, the lion’s share of screenings will be hosted at Violet Crown Cinema’s brand-spanking new Dallas location. A handful of screenings for DIFF 2023 will also be held at the historic Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, aka my friendly neighborhood art house cinema.
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A new bill has been introduced in the Florida state legislature that will clamp down on what teachers are allowed to say to students when it comes to sex education. Because the kinds of people pushing draconian measures like the “Don’t Say Gay” law and the “Stop WOKE” act find it icky to think of any function involving reproductive organs beyond something that happens “down there,” this new Florida bill would naturally preclude any adult in a school setting from saying anything about menstruation to a child not yet in sixth grade. Never mind that girls can start menstruating as early as age ten.
I’ll issue this next statement in a whisper, in order to protect Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, should he read it and get the vapors: (The new movie Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. is about girls getting their period.)
Is everyone OK?
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Almost from the start of Lana Wilson’s intimate yet sprawling portrait of the life and career of model and actress Brooke Shields, it becomes apparent that the director wants to use her subject to dig deep into the psychology of the culture that produced a figure like Shields. It’s also quickly apparent that Shields – who was used for the purposes of others long before she had the slightest bit of agency in the matter – is a willing and enthusiastic conspirator in the project.
Together the two women have crafted a searing indictment of how our society did, and, more importantly, still does, treat woman solely as sexual objects for the gratification of straight men. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields also manages to present its subject as a whole person. By the end of the film, we feel we’ve seen Ms. Shields from every angle of her personality. It should be no surprise that this thoughtful and careful examination is infinitely more fulfilling than what those early in Shields’s career coveted her for, namely her beauty and her body.
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A woman crouches on a rocky cliff overlooking the sea. She is examining a handful of white flowers with long, red stamen. She sticks a steel soil thermometer into the ground next to the flowers to check the temperature. From a distance, we see her walking along the horizon; her bright red windbreaker is striking against the green and gray of her island surroundings. She carefully drops a rock into a deep well, listening for the splash as it hits the water far below. Next, we see her recording her observations in a notebook. She writes the date – it’s April of 1973 – the temperature from the soil thermometer (14.3° C, or about 57° F) and the words “no change”.
Everything else that happens in Enys Men happens around this basic routine, which we see a dozen times over the course of the picture. It’s the most mundane depiction of data collection you could imagine. In contrast to that mundanity, the woman, referred to only as “The Volunteer” in the film’s closing credits, experiences either a psychological crisis or a metaphysical terror, though the movie never definitively answers which. We experience her reality in the form of existential dread.
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You might be forgiven, especially considering Hollywood’s reputation, for expecting a movie titled Tetris to behave more like the 2012 screen adaptation of the popular board game Battleship and less like an intricately plotted spy picture, an 8-bit Bond. Thanks to Noah Pink’s tightly paced screenplay, Jon S. Baird’s crowd-pleasing direction, and a true story that the pair embellished in order to make it sing on the big screen, 8-bit Bond is what we get. Tetris is a raucous good time. It also has more on its mind than how seven geometric game pieces might fit together.
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If you need any X-mas gift ideas for me this year, here’s one: a custom-made shirt that says, “I went to SXSW in 2023, and all I got was a case of covid.” After successfully avoiding that spikey little bastard for three full years, it finally got me. Unfortunately, that means it got my wife, too, since I didn’t know I was sick until after I returned home. She says she’s not mad at me. I believe her, because, frankly, she’s a better person than I am.
It was probably the one music show I attended at South By that got me sick. It was a small venue, fairly tightly packed, and I didn’t wear a mask at all for it. (My only defense is, after a trip to Ebert Interruptus, Fantastic Fest, and Las Vegas last year, I was clearly under the mistaken assumption that I was invincible.) When Melody, my friend and couch-provider-for-the-week, told me that Tangerine Dream was playing after my last screening for the day, I was all in. I audibly gasped when she told me about the show.
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My first South By Southwest experience has been dominated by documentaries so far. Over my first two days of the fest, I’ve seen five films, and four of them were docs.
I arrived in Austin at a little after one in the afternoon on Monday. After checking in at the convention center to obtain my badge and any pertinent information I needed, I headed straight to the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar Blvd. As soon as I realized that the S. Lamar Alamo was one of the seven venues showing films for SXSW, I knew that’s where I should start, since I was already familiar with the location. I spent eight days there for Fantastic Fest 2022, after all.
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Through the generosity of a benefactor – which makes it sound like I’m Pip in Great Expectations – I’m happy to announce that I’ll be attending the South by Southwest 2023 Conference and Festival. I have scored a complimentary badge to the film festival programming for this year’s SXSW celebration.
Running March 10-19, the fest has already started, and, due to the short notice that a badge was coming my way, as well as a few prior commitments, I’ll be down in Austin to see as much as possible between Monday, March 13 and Friday, March 17, a solid five days of screenings. This will be my first time attending SXSW, and I’m excited to find out if it lives up to the hype.
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Do nothing. Stay and fight. Leave.
These are the options up for debate in Women Talking. The people debating, the titular women doing the talking, are a self-appointed committee representing all of the women in their isolated Mennonite colony that eschews modern conveniences like electricity and observes a strict patriarchal hierarchy.
The reason for their secret meetings is about as horrifying as you could imagine. It’s come to light that certain men in the colony have been using cow tranquilizers on women and girls in the community in order to rape and abuse them. They know this because one of the victims caught them in the act.
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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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