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Each and every time I sit down to write about a movie – and I’m assuming this is true for any film critic who gives a damn about their craft – one of my main objectives is to find an angle or a take that is in some way novel. I want to bring something new to the conversation about whatever movie it is that I’ve decided to dedicate a review to. For the documentary No Other Land, I’ve decided to go the opposite route. For this review, I’m going to be about as original as your average 8-year-old.
If Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 masterpiece There Will Be Blood is a movie about the relentless and often cruel pursuit of progress and (more importantly) profit that drives the collective psyche of the United States of America – with Daniel Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview as the personification of US greed and pitilessness – then Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is about the view from the immigrant experience in those conditions.
I wish I was more in love with director RaMell Ross’s striking and avant-garde stylistic vision for Nickel Boys. The director previously received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature for his similarly unconventional aesthetic in Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which focuses on the Black community in Hale County, Alabama. (While researching for this review, I discovered that Ross’s inspiration for that earlier film was Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi cycle of films. I had already heard excellent things about Hale County, but, as the Qatsi trilogy is one of my cinematic touchstones, I’m now more determined to catch up with Ross’s 2018 film.)
The echoes of the past that we hear in the opening minutes of Furiosa, which tell us why human society is but a memory, feel unsettlingly familiar. Pandemic. Runaway climate disaster and ecocide caused by human carbon emissions. Political instability and oppression. Gas wars. Water wars. Societal collapse. The first few minutes of the movie feel more like documentary than action spectacle. Here in the real world, our planet is dying and we’re literally running out of water; it feels like we’re all waiting for the proverbial dam to break.
What a fun and exciting topic for an escapist action blockbuster, right?
Turns out, in George Miller’s capable hands, that is right.
Thirty minutes into the documentary Queendom, we see the film’s subject, Gena Marvin, writhing in a large performance space in nothing but thong underwear. A cut reveals a host of characters covered head-to-toe in shiny, latex-like material who are standing menacingly in front of Gena. Each of these suits – which, because they cover every inch of the performers’ bodies, are reminiscent of BDSM gear – is one of three solid colors. The colors consist of the three represented on the Russian Federation flag. Those colors happen to be red, white, and blue.
The next shot shows Gena staring above her directly into the camera. She is now surrounded by these patriotic figures, who encircle her in rings of the red, blue, and white suits. They jostle and envelop Gena, slowly pushing her down, swallowing her up from view of the camera. If you’re looking for a central metaphor for Queendom, you can’t do much better than this moment.
The magic contained within the rich history of the found footage subgenre, which includes 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, the Paranormal Activity series, as well as the runaway hit The Blair Witch Project, depends on the filmmakers presenting something that might have actually happened. That’s harder to do when you look up at the screen and immediately think, “Hey, it’s Polka-Dot Man from The Suicide Squad!”
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.
Director Alexander Payne’s emotionally rich, quietly moving triumph The Holdovers is a study in the old cliché “before judging someone, walk a mile in their shoes.” Payne harnesses the empathetic powers of the movies – an artform the late, great Roger Ebert once called “an empathy machine” – to deliver a complex and heartfelt character study of three souls each struggling with their own demons and who find a brief solace in each other from the myriad cruelties of the outside world.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi, I’m a straight, white, cis-gender Ken. We all know that straight, white, cis-gender Kens have one super power: explaining things to people. When we aren’t out riding horses or beaching each other off, we Kens wield this powerful and unquestionable skill for the benefit of the Barbies in our lives. The most passionate of us scale this up, so as to explain things to millions of Barbies at once by gaining a modicum of influence in cultural, governmental, and/or media circles.
Instead of using my super power to enlighten Barbies about how amazing The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II are – don’t get me started on the travesty that is The Godfather: Part III – I’ve decided to use my precious gift to explain a few things to some Kens out there who just don’t get the new Greta Gerwig movie Barbie.
The gleefully raunchy gross-out comedy of 2023 has arrived. Joy Ride sticks to a formula and its story beats might be a little too familiar, but the phenomenally talented cast, who are up for damn near anything, make the movie sing. It’s destined to be compared to 2011’s Bridesmaids, since both movies feature predominantly female casts and revel in their bawdiness, but Joy Ride, along with Bridesmaids, holds its own with some of the best hard-R comedies of recent memory, like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Booksmart, another female-centered absurdist comedy.
I knew I was in for a good time as soon as the introductory scene pumped up Ants Marching by Dave Matthews Band on the soundtrack as a way to establish a predominantly white community. I’m as big a fan of DMB as the next guy – as long as the next guy is a hacky-sacking hippie – but I can recognize and fully understand why the band is gently mocked as something with which certain subsets of white people are obsessed.
Like Star Wars before it, the Indiana Jones franchise has escaped the hands of its original creators. What makes this fact notable is how aggressively this first – and perhaps last? – installment in the Indy saga without Steven Spielberg and George Lucas at the helm looks back to the franchise’s past. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny walks a fine line between honoring what’s come before it while forging a path ahead.
For the most part, it works.
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
The most fascinating thing that happens during a screening of BlackBerry comes seconds after the closing credits start. That’s when everyone in the audience picks up the little $1000 computer that we all carry around with us, so we can check what’s come in while we were busy staring at a different screen for a few hours. This strictly observed ritual takes place millions of times in movie theaters across the country each year. I’m sorry to say there are plenty of people who simply can’t wait until the movie is over before worshipping at the altar of their personalized mobile device.
What makes this now-common act of servility to technology something of note when considering BlackBerry is that the audience has only seconds ago seen a story integral to explaining how things got this way. BlackBerry tells the story of, as one character in the movie puts it, the phone everybody had before they got an iPhone. Director Matt Johnson and his wonderful cast frame this story as a goofy comedy, at least until the pathos kicks in and things get unexpectedly poignant.
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.
