“I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.”
These words are spoken in The Zone of Interest – director Jonathan Glazer’s utterly transfixing and horrifying film about the Holocaust – over a breakfast table as the woman who utters them eats her morning eggs.
If you didn’t know the actual words used and were asked to guess at what was being said using her tone, the surroundings, and the action, you might say that this woman was reminding the young lady serving the meal that the salt and pepper shakers need to be brought to the table, or that the coffee isn’t quite up to par this morning. She seems a little put out, but delivers the very real threat of murder like she’s annoyed that the napkins are folded incorrectly.
Here lies the sickening magic at the heart of Glazer’s nauseatingly potent picture. We don’t witness a single act of violence over the course of The Zone of Interest’s 104 minutes, yet it succeeds as a deeply disturbing portrait of what political theorist, historian, and philosopher Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil.”
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We’re not even a month into 2024, and I already have a contender for most bonkers movie of the year. Coming from Norway, The Bitcoin Car is a tragicomic musical about a small village that begins to experience troubling phenomena when a brand-new bitcoin mining facility starts operations. This movie has it all: an irrepressibly upbeat song about how death unites us all, singing electrons, an anti-capitalist worldview, and a goat named Chlamydia.
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The world might be falling apart by almost any metric you can imagine, but one thing (maybe the only thing?) that gave me solace this year was the amazing slate of films that 2023 provided. To my mind, 2023 was the best year in cinema since 2007, another banner movie year with an incredibly rich set of releases.
As you’ll see, 2023 offered up a similarly seemingly bottomless well of great cinema.
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Never underestimate the power of saying something old in a fresh, new way. With his feature film debut American Fiction, writer and director Cord Jefferson is standing on the shoulders of giants – namely Robert Townsend and Spike Lee’s – with his biting satire about what kinds of Black stories interest white audiences. And while the satire might be razor sharp, Jefferson simultaneously offers up a slice-of-life story about a man coming to terms with his imperfect family, how they’ve shaped him into an imperfect person, and how he’s helped with that project himself.
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Based on a 1992 novel by surrealist Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, Lanthimos infuses his wacked-out aesthetic into this modern, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by way of Hal Ashby’s Being There. Sitting through Poor Things is an incendiary, hypnotic experience. The film’s subject matter is about nothing less than the human compulsion for self-improvement.
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I’m publishing my first ever review round-up of recent releases. This is a chance for me to get on the record concerning titles that I’m excited to wrestle with, but in short-form capsule reviews, so I can cover as many as possible. To make a long story short (too late!), here are some brief thoughts on four winter 2023 releases.
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Two years ago – before confirming it, I would have sworn it was at least four – I wrote in this space about attending an incredible re-creation of an important day in US history that has a significant tie to cinema. Each year on November 22, the operators of the Texas Theatre run the original program that was scheduled on the day that Lee Harvey Oswald walked into the theater, without buying a ticket, and was arrested less than an hour later as the man who had assassinated John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States.
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A few months ago, I wrote in this space about a brand-new film festival debuting at the city-owned Plaza Theatre in Garland, Texas. I published the article enough in advance of the first (but hopefully far from last) annual It Came from Texas Film Festival so that any readers who were interested could snag festival passes at the early-bird, discounted rate.
I enjoyed attending the fest so much – I made all but two of the eleven feature presentations; one because I had already screened it in preparation for my piece in September, the other because it started at eleven P.M. and I am very old and tired – that I wanted to provide an overview of the experience.
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How many masterpieces can one person produce? We may never know, but iconic filmmaker – and elder statesman of cinema – Martin Scorsese seems determined to find out before he’s finished behind the camera. After the likes of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, and at least five other pictures that deserve consideration as masterpieces, Scorsese has done it again.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a sprawling, ambitious, deeply moving mashup of the director’s beloved gangster genre and his first Western, which wrestles with American sins that a not-insignificant portion of our population would like to bury and ignore forever.
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Legendary experimental documentary filmmaker Godfrey Reggio’s newest project helped me understand what frustrated me so much about the 2021 film Don’t Look Up. That’s director Adam McKay’s cri de coeur polemic about our rapid destruction of the planet and our steadfast complacency to do anything about it, including even recognizing that there’s a problem. In my review for Don’t Look Up, I primarily focused on McKay’s ineffective smugness as a tool for chastising the general public for refusing to take the threat of climate change seriously. (In the film, a meteor’s impending collision with earth is used as a metaphor for climate change.)
While watching Reggio’s latest picture, Once Within a Time – the documentarian shares a co-directing credit with Jon Kane, who served as editor on Reggio’s Naqoyqatsi and Visitors – similar feelings surfaced to the ones I had while watching Don’t Look Up. Once Within a Time doesn’t have a smugness problem. Reggio’s film is playful, at times impenetrable, and evinces a bemused perplexity at the current human condition more than any need to arrogantly lecture. My frustration with the film – and, what I belatedly realized was my frustration with Don’t Look Up – is the missed opportunity of targeting the actual culprits that have caused our current situation.
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Blonde Death is a stunning piece of outsider art/trash cinema. Made in 1984 by first (and only) time director James Robert Baker – aka James Dillinger – the shot-on-VHS movie is Badlands by way of a soap opera. Baker was a member of an early- ‘80s L.A. art collective called EZTV, and he was a prolific author of, as Wikipedia describes it, “sharply satirical, predominantly gay-themed transgressional fiction.” Shot with a budget of $2000 of his own money, Blonde Death has an air of Tennessee Williams about it, albeit unapologetically queer and gloriously transgressive.
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As I type this, I’m getting ready to reserve my tickets for day three of the fest before making the short trek to the theater for day two’s first screening. On the docket for today is my first documentary, Scala!!!, a Fantastic Fest original found footage festival, two more 2023 releases, The Origin and What You Wish For, and I’ll wrap things up at midnight with a 1984 repertory screening of Blonde Death.
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This will be a short one; day one of the fest is more like a quarter day, with the opening film of the festival – Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger – and a few other titles starting at 8 P.M. Other titles playing in the 8 P.M. block are The Animal Kingdom, Baby Assassins 2, #Manhole, and Messiah of Evil. There are three titles in the midnight round tonight, Sleep, In My Mother’s Skin, and Divinity.
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It’s that time of year again! I’m ready to kick off Spooky Season 2023 in grand style with a trip to Austin, TX for Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest Film Festival, which programs the wildest, most bonkers horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and cult genre films out there.
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I have a friend – who shall remain nameless – who, I think, enjoys trying to wind me up every once in a while with a particular movie hot take. Every so often in my presence, this person will say a slightly different version of, “Any movie made before 1993 is basically hot garbage, right?” (This person is known for making incendiary and facetious statements, and it’s always in good fun. The sage observation comes from a third party (whom I’ve never met) who said that Demolition Man is the Rosetta Stone here.) Each time this little nugget gets trotted out, a half-smile appears on my face, and I respond with some variation of, “Yeah, it doesn’t matter how many times you say that, I’m never going to agree with you.”
If there is any single work to once-and-for-all incinerate the notion that “old movies are bad,” it’s Northern Irish documentarian Mark Cousins’s epic, 18+ hour magnum opus The Complete Story of Film, a meditation on the greatest art form ever invented.
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Director Emma Seligman has made the next great teen sex comedy by parodying all the ones that have come before it. At the same time, Bottoms also wickedly satirizes David Fincher’s Fight Club. It’s unapologetically queer, giddily violent, and subversively hilarious. With her two stars, Rachel Sennott – who helped write the screenplay with Seligman – and Ayo Edebiri, the trio have crafted the kind of comedy that makes you laugh out loud at least once every scene by wielding a gonzo and cutting sense of humor.
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We have a brand-new film festival in the great state of Texas. The It Came from Texas Film Fest will take an inaugural bow on October 28 and 29, right in time to help kick off what’s become known in the past few years as Spooky Season. That’s an apropos time slot, because, per festival director Kelly Kitchens, It Came from Texas will largely showcase campy drive-in double feature titles from the 1950s through the 1970s, offering up I-have-to-see-this-based-on-the-title-alone fare like Zontar: Thing from Venus, Beyond the Time Barrier, and Attack of the Eye Creatures.
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Red, White & Royal Blue is a love story between Alex and Henry. Even in the best circumstances, the two men would be in for plenty of judgement and bigotry from people who refuse to recognize that love is love. The situation of this particular romance, however, is exponentially more complicated. That’s because Alex happens to be the First Son of the United States – in the alternate universe of the movie, his mother, Ellen Claremont, is the first female POTUS – and Henry is the spare heir to the British throne. The movie is a fun, whimsical rom-com fantasy that soars on the chemistry of its two leads, even as the uninspired direction and visual style leave much to be desired.
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I can report that the newest iteration of the Heroes on a Half-Shell, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, is exactly what it needs to be, namely, fun. Since it seems we’ve all resigned ourselves to an entertainment future populated solely by established corporate franchise IP – as much as I loved Barbie, it does make me chuckle that it’s considered an original concept, even though it’s based on one of the most instantly recognizable bits of IP in American history – a fun time seems like the least that the Hollywood franchise machine can give us.
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Talk to Me, the nasty, visceral horror film out of Australia, offers up plenty of themes for dissection, but there’s something to be said for simply getting caught up in its wicked charms. Twin brother directing team Danny and Michael Philippou, who are the creative minds behind the YouTube channel RackaRacka, have made a chilling feature film debut in Talk to Me. If you can handle its gruesome sensibility, their film delivers horrific imagery and a scare around every corner.
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