2019’s Top Films
There are two kinds of people in the world.
There are some people who, rather than merely “entertaining” themselves, watch the most important, the most beautiful, the most challenging, and the most thought-provoking films released each year; and there are some people who don’t.
The list below was created to assist the former.
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January 19th – Brexit (2019), directed by Toby Haynes
From Keith Watson at Metro:
“[A]ccording to James Graham’s razor-sharp analysis of the referendum that has shaken British politics to the core, it is the name of the Vote Leave campaign director that should loom large in history — even if he is much too clever to put himself in the firing line. Played with slippery intensity in an inspired performance by Benedict Cumberbatch, Cummings emerges as a ferociously intelligent, socially prickly maverick fired up by a sense of indignation that his genius has been passed over by inferior minds (the rest of the world). The trick here was that, surrounded as he was by babbling politicians, you could see where Cummings was coming from.
For those of us with Brexit fatigue, fearful that it was too soon to dramatise this crisis, it is worth noting that Graham’s story wisely steers clear of the rights and wrongs of the argument. That really would be too soon. Instead the script burrows deep into the seismic shift that social media — and those who manipulate it — is having on politics. Cumberbatch’s Cummings catches on with lightning speed that we are all now slaves to the algorithm, and cannily targets voters the opposition did not even know existed. It was impossible not to be both impressed and appalled as we watched him turn the voting tide with a social media war based on soundbites and subliminal advertising on Facebook. As a TV drama, it has flaws. More background on Cummings would not have gone amiss. But as a lesson in the new politics this is both chilling and compelling. The revolution has happened without us even noticing.”
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January 28th – Honeyland (2019), directed by Tamara Kotevska & Ljubomir Stefanov
From Alissa Wilkinson at Vox:
“Honeyland is a vibrant, fascinating, and sober documentary that examines a serious issue — the endangerment of bees — by way of a human portrait. Hatidze Muratova is the last beekeeper in Macedonia, who lives on a quiet, secluded mountain and cares for her elderly mother. Her life’s work, as she sees it, isn’t just to keep the bees; it’s to help restore balance to the ecosystem around her, and bees are a vital part of that. But that solitude is disrupted when a family of nomadic beekeepers arrive, seeking honey to sell. They not only disrupt Hatidze and threaten the insects’ existence — they invade an established way of life on the relatively untouched mountain. As the film progresses, different ways of thinking about commerce as well as beekeeping and the natural world come together in a story that is sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful, and often enlightening.”
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February 1st – They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), directed by Peter Jackson
From Jeffrey Overstreet at Looking Closer:
“Honoring these intimate archival recordings, Jackson reveals harrowing accounts of the misleading propaganda that summoned so many young men, the dehumanizing pressures of the war, the particular chaos and slaughter of the Somme, the burdens that the survivors would have to carry, and the betrayals, abandonment, and loneliness that awaited those few who returned. And as we listen, he fills the screen with highlights (that word sounds trite and inappropriate here) from more than 600 hours of material from the Imperial War Museum and BBC archives. Much of it is sharpened and focused, but then, as in Wings of Desire and The Wizard of Oz, its black-and-white footage suddenly blooms into color and detail that takes your breath away.
The footage casts no doubt on the grim and grisly testimonies. I know that much of this imagery has been easily accessible for many years, but it is another thing to see it on a grand scale, so carefully restored, so wisely organized and edited. I won’t soon forget the stories or the images: Bodies bent at unnatural angles. The mud that swallowed soldiers whole. A parade of men in blindfold-bandages suffering from mustard-gas blindness. Vast fields of dead rats. As we look back at gazes both solemn and snarky, frightened and fierce, we’re often aware that a soldier’s expression was one of the last pleas or semblances of strength he ever expressed …
Critic Steve Sheehan at The Digital Fix argues that the movie is too relentless, too crowded. ‘These men’s stories need to be heard but they also deserve to be given space to breathe. For the audience to digest and process the enormity of what they are seeing, the words and pictures need more time to settle.’ Perhaps. I tend to think that the relentlessness of the testimonies represents, to some extent, the experience of being there: They did not have time to breathe as the madness unfolded around them and demanded everything of them, so why should such testimonies be padded for our comfort?”
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February 1st – Arctic (2018), directed by Joe Penna
From Todd Jorgenson at Cinemalogue:
“Offering a fresh twist on familiar elements, this wintry survival saga benefits from a committed performance by Mads Mikkelsen (The Hunt) as the lone survivor of an airplane crash trying to survive in the rugged terrain and harsh conditions. As his hopes for rescue dwindle, a higher calling prompts him to flee his makeshift camp for a perilous trek toward a ranger station. While it’s relentlessly bleak and somewhat contrived, the feature debut for Brazilian director Joe Penna is vivid and suspenseful. Mikkelsen generates sympathy despite acting mostly by himself with very little context or dialogue, finding a chilling sense of hope amid desperate circumstances.”
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February 15th – Birds of Passage (2018), directed by Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra
From Michael J. Casey at Boulder Weekly:
“Set in Colombia and spanning the years 1969 to 1980, Birds is divided into five sections, songs really, that recount the tale of ancient rituals, tight-knit tribes and the sudden and violent encroachment of capitalism thanks to the profitability of the drug trade. Like most stories depicting the rise and fall of an empire, Birds begins with an attraction. Specifically between the young Zaida (Natalia Reyes) and the bachelor Rapayet (José Acosta) at Zaida’s coming out ceremony. With a flurry of images that both disorient and enchant, Gallego and Guerra invoke Dante’s first encounter with Beatrice in Vita Nuova: ‘Here is a God stronger than I who comes to rule over me’ …
Rapayet, a kingpin who is no Michael Corleone. Haunted by past actions, dreams and an ever-present specter of death that takes the form of a bird, Rapayet is a man in over his head. As the action unfolds, Rapayet has a shot-through look as if he wandered off the pages of a Gabriel García Márquez novel and found himself on the set of The Godfather as directed by Luis Buñuel. To reiterate, Birds of Passage is a masterpiece. Coming off 2015’s equally dreamy Embrace of the Serpent, directors Gallego and Guerra worked closely with Wayuu advisors to faithfully capture the details of the culture. They took those details, decorated them with surrealistic imagery and infused them with flavors so familiar no audience should feel estranged.”
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March 1st – Transit (2018), directed by Christian Petzold
From Justin Chang at The Los Angeles Times:
“The two pictures he directed before this one — Barbara (2012), a tale of political resistance set in 1980 East Germany, and Phoenix (2015), about a Holocaust survivor rising from the ashes of a bombed-out Berlin — are superbly restrained thrillers that set the forces of history against the persistence of desire. In these conflict zones, love is a force that both clarifies and confuses, sustaining the characters’ will to keep going even as it complicates their survival.
The same holds true in Transit, though the contours of a love story, like other crucial details, take a while to emerge. Adapted from a 1944 novel by German writer Anna Seghers, the movie completes a loose historical trilogy that began with Barbara and Phoenix, though it turns out to be a more mysterious and audacious picture than either. In a bold conceptual gambit, Petzold pries Seghers’ story loose from its temporal moorings and sets it adrift in a vague, unspecified time frame, one that feels as fraught as 1942 and looks as urgent as the present …
Taken together, the vagueness of the setting and the precision of the filmmaking create a gentle but insistent tension. Transit has both the evanescence of a dream and the urgent clarity of a newspaper headline. When Georg arrives in Marseille, the city — with its wide-open harbor front and sparsely populated roads — takes on the haunted quality of a sunlit purgatory. Elsewhere, the many scenes at a crowded American consulate, where Georg joins a long line of people trying to secure their exit papers, nod in the direction of a Kafka-esque bureaucratic satire.”
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March 15th – Ash Is Purest White (2018), directed by Zhangke Jia
From Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune:
“The exquisite Ash Is Purest White owes some of its richness to the movies, particularly crime and gangster movies in various languages. The rest of it comes from the poetic eye of writer-director Jia Zhangke, who shows us what he feels about the real world as represented by contemporary China — its telling details, creased faces and panoramic visions of progress bulldozing its way into the future, at a great many people’s expense. This is one of Zhangke’s peak achievements: pure cinema, and a story of the underworld unlike anything you’ve seen before.
For much of his career Zhangke has collaborated with the actress (and, since 2012, the director’s wife) Zhao Tao. Ash Is Purest White hands Tao one of the very best screen opportunities. As Qiao, the clear-eyed lover of a provincial gangster played to steely perfection by Liao Fan, she makes the simple act of listening — to heartbreaking news, or to her most conflicted inner thoughts — a riveting series of micro-revelations … Some films present a feast for the eye with great flourish and extravagance. This one is a different kind of feast. If there’s a director alive whose compositions breathe more easily and move a story forward with a more stimulating variety of visual strategies, let me know.”
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March 15th – The Mustang (2019), directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
From Mark Dujsik:
“The film tells a very simple story about a man, prone to violence without much—if any—warning, who comes to see himself in a wild horse and, gradually, learns what sets him apart from the animal. There are unexpected layers to this character, who seems to want to control his outbursts of rage, only to find himself becoming enraged by that lack of control over his impulses. He receives occasional visits from his pregnant teenage daughter Martha (Gideon Adlon), who wants legal emancipation from her father in order to pursue her own life, and that relationship, strained by years of separation and equal resentment (He is clearly upset that her visits have become infrequent, and she has had to face the consequences of the reason he’s in prison), serves as a sort of litmus test for Roman’s progress …
Just as training a wild horse comes down to a matter of understanding the animal’s feelings and controlling one’s own, Roman’s rehabilitation is in understanding to control his impulses and in recognizing that other people are affected by his inability to do so. The minimal plot has that gradual understanding put to the test, as Roman tries to calm his frustration with the stubborn mustang and resolve his participation in a drug-smuggling scheme, which he is coerced into by his cellmate (played by Josh Stewart). It’s an empathetic story, bolstered by Schoenaerts’ subtly revelatory performance. The Mustang isn’t about Roman earning his freedom through his reformation. It’s about the reformation itself, which is in understanding that others—including a wild horse—deserve freedom as much as he believes he does.”
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March 29th – Dumbo (2019), directed by Tim Burton
From Alissa Wilkinson at Vox:
“Burton, whose most recent string of films (from at least 2010’s Alice in Wonderland to 2016’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and maybe longer) have disappointed and baffled former fans. Whither the weird, macabre artist responsible for Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns? Why all this banal dreck? Burton’s films arguably took a nosedive once he started getting a larger budget to make them — all spectacle, little heart or soul — and this new version of Dumbo feels eerily like an attempt to apologize for his later, passionless work.
And if that wasn’t a strange enough thing to inject into a lighthearted kids’ movie, Burton’s Dumbo remake is unmistakably a critique of entertainers who sell out to greedy corporations for the cash. Specifically, to Disney. That last point is made with a sharp barb. Burton’s Dumbo is very nearly explicit about the dangers of Big Disney. It’s not just an allegory; the amusement park created by Keaton’s villainous character, entertainment mogul V.A. Vandevere, is undeniably modeled on Disney’s parks, right down to a version of Tomorrowland’s ‘House of the Future,’ showcasing now-quaint technologies that ‘future’ homes will have. The resemblance is too clear to be accidental.”
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April 5th – High Life (2018), directed by Claire Denis
From Alissa Wilkinson at Vox:
“High Life is a wild, visionary film from director Claire Denis about a group of convicts on death row who are sent into deep space for the sake of science. It’s not for the faint of heart — it’s about sex and reproduction and death and life — and it’s anything but sterile. In this case, sci-fi’s enduring quest to probe what it means to be human means that bodily fluids, violence, and deep loneliness all make their appearances.
Robert Pattinson leads a cast that also features Mia Goth and Juliette Binoche, and gives a performance that’s equal parts unexpected and tender, as a father on board the ship caring for his young daughter in what is essentially a life lived as a death sentence. All told, the film is a confounding meditation on what it means to truly exist — and it’s wholly original.”
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April 12th – Mary Magdalene (2018), directed by Garth Davis
From Nick Allen at RogerEbert.com:
‘Mary Magdalene does not have any major beats regarding Jesus and the Apostles that anyone who has studied the story would not know. Christ gains a following performing the miracles like bringing a dead man back to life, with Greig Fraser’s handheld cinematography immersing us in hysterical crowds that feature new believers. And once Jesus’ followers speak loudly enough about him being a messiah, a term he lives in fear of throughout, the Romans crucify him. With Davis’ editing gradually focusing on Jesus without losing sight of Mary, “Mary Magdalene” creates a definitive, rich foundation of raw compassion, where many of its scenes rely on simply what you feel from seeing their acts of mercy. The film compels you to look past previous iterations, and to engage the overall tale for its bizarre beauty: a radical movement, led by a tormented man of select words, who speaks of a kingdom that human beings can make a reality. As someone who watched it twice in 24 hours, Mary Magdalene moved me in a way that no previous film about Christianity ever has.
Mara is excellent in a role that displays her precision in her acting and reacting—she is the most subdued actor in the entire movie, but that does not make her work any less powerful. In the film’s more contemplative moments, she creates a compelling inner life. Listening, witnessing. But when Davis’ editing does focus more on her, interacting with the elated Apostles or the downtrodden Jesus, it is the work of a full character, created mostly in silence. Mara has a very emotional scene in which she and Peter care for people who are dying from starvation, and the mercy that she communicates as Mary is stunning.”
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April 14th – Les Misérables (2018), written by Andrew Davies
From Caroline Framke at Variety:
“This new version of Les Misérables comes to us in the form of a handsome, sweeping, straightforward series of six episodes. Davies and director Tom Shankland aren’t trying to reinvent the period piece wheel here so much as spiff it up and send it on its way. And that they do, telling the interweaving stories of the earnest, passionate, petty, complex citizens of post-revolutionary Paris with efficient ease …
West, who figuratively and often literally shoulders the lion’s share of the series as Valjean, has more to work with — and to his credit, he makes use of every ounce of the material he gets. His Valjean also knows his way around a snarl, but his is tinged with a deep and palpable sadness that never dissipates until his last moments. In fact, the skill with which West and Davies reveal Valjean’s many dimensions is the glue that holds their Les Misérables together. No retelling of this story works without truly digging into Valjean’s story, ethos, and psyche; his desperate quest to become a better person in peace is the unlikely beating heart of the entire thing, and this production knows it.
That’s because there’s a reason why Les Misérables continues to endure, with or without spontaneous bursts of music. It tells tales of inequality and injustice, decency and depravity. It traces the many infuriating ways that bad circumstances and luck can destroy lives, as well as the transformative, miraculous relief a simple act of kindness can bring. Valjean’s journey of learned compassion is the starkest example of it, but most every character in Les Misérables experiences similar awakenings. How good, then, to have a version that has the room and wherewithal to let them.”
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April 14th – Game of Thrones: Season Eight (2018), created by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss
From Ishaan Tharoor at The Washington Post:
“Given the popularity of Game of Thrones overseas, as well as the pervasiveness of references to it in the broader culture, it’s not surprising that a whole range of thinkers and academics draw meaning from its medieval fantasy world. ‘Its story, rooted in a world that often punishes heroism, rewards the wealthy, and is filled with treachery, feels like a sadly appropriate mirror of our own,’ wrote Eric Deggans, NPR‘s TV critic. ‘But the flawed characters who begin this new season fighting to save themselves and their families are mostly the kind of heroes we hope to be, facing a historic moment with courage and resolve.’
Then, of course, there are the political undertones. George R.R. Martin, the author of the books that gave life to the TV series, adapted the series’ dynastic struggles from England’s 15th-century Wars of the Roses. More generally, he modeled his invented continent of Westeros on the geography and history of the British Isles. But that hasn’t stopped him from casting his eye to the present … Trump, it can be argued, is also an archetypical member of the Lannister family: weaned on great wealth and driven by the single-minded goal of boosting his family name. Or you could say that his apocalyptic view of the world is similar to the zeal of the cult of the Red God. For Trump, who sees ‘a mess’ in every issue and chaos lurking behind every corner, the night is truly ‘dark and full of terrors’ — and, incidentally, he seeks to expunge America’s enemies with fire.
… This new season offers plenty of other parables: The continent of Westeros is facing a divisive refugee crisis in the north; political leaders, consumed by their own jockeying for power, are ignoring a growing climatic menace that might kill everyone; and there’s a brewing regional conflagration that may hinge on weapons of mass destruction and the decisions of those wielding them. ‘Dragons are the nuclear deterrent,’ Martin mused in 2011. ‘But is that sufficient? These are the kind of issues I’m trying to explore. The United States right now has the ability to destroy the world with our nuclear arsenal, but that doesn’t mean we can achieve specific geopolitical goals. Power is more subtle than that. You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn’t give you the power to reform, or improve, or build.’
Game of Thrones is indeed a meditation on the subtlety and fickleness of power. Hubris and complacency are always punished, so too naivete and blind trust. The story is propelled along through hideous battles, surprise assassinations and garish scenes of violence. It is a world of angst and dread. As my colleague Alyssa Rosenberg wrote, the show provides ‘a cautionary tale’ about the perils of believing in great and lasting change. The transformative slogans of politicians almost always ring hollow and good things invariably come to an end — but that doesn’t mean one should abandon hope. ‘It’s not so much that winter is coming this time, but that history tells us, if only we’d remember to read it, that winter comes again and again,’ Rosenberg wrote, invoking the show’s most well-known aphorism. ‘And ultimately, so does spring.’”
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April 19th – Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), directed by Gan Bi
From Alissa Wilkinson at Vox:
“Bi Gan’s dusky neo-noir film Long Day’s Journey Into Night — no relation to the Eugene O’Neill play — is a technical marvel. It premiered at Cannes in 2018 and drew astounded raves for the nearly hour-long 3D single-shot sequence that makes up the film’s second half. Bi had to carefully plot the scene (which winds through many locations and involves dozens of actors and extras), and shoot it seven times before he got it right. The result does not disappoint.
But Long Day’s Journey is also a swoony stunner, the tale of Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue), a man who returns to his hometown of Kaili after many years away, to attend his father’s funeral. And while he’s there, he begins to search for the woman he once loved, Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei). With rich imagery and a dreamlike narrative, Long Day’s Journey establishes Gan as one of the rising stars of world cinema. It’s mesmerizing and unforgettable.”
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April 19th – Little Woods (2018), directed by Nia DaCosta
From Ella Taylor at NPR:
“The opioid crisis looms large over Little Woods, a modest but intensely empathetic first film by writer–director Nia DaCosta. But you won’t see lurid footage of bewildered tots hovering near the prone bodies of parents immobilized by Oxycontin. Instead, the movie draws its drama from the underground economy in which the prescription drug crisis thrives, and the perpetual state of emergency lived by residents of former boomtowns faded into ghost towns by recession or corporate flight …
DaCosta calls her feature debut a modern Western, but that’s a bit of a stretch. If anything, Little Woods plays as a quietly feminist thriller with a procedural bent, if that’s what you can call the endless grind of trying to stay afloat. The film wrings severe beauty from a desolate landscape of cavernous nocturnal parking lots and rickety plywood interiors. Thematically and visually, Little Woods is of a piece with Courtney Hunt’s 2008 Frozen River, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008), and Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010) — intimate realist dramas with a touch of the Grimm fairytale, made by women about women struggling to rise above lives hemmed in by danger and deprivation.”
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April 19th – The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), directed by Terry Gilliam
From Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com:
“Witty, goofy, and glorious, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is Terry Gilliam’s best film in two decades. Yes, the critical accusations after its Cannes premiere that it’s messy are 100% right, but it’s a beautiful mess, the kind of passionate, creative filmmaking that the director made back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. After several films in which the mess overwhelmed him, it’s wonderful to see Gilliam able to finally realize the vision that eluded him for a quarter-century in such a complete and satisfying way. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has been in production for so long that Gilliam has gone from the young character of Toby in his film to the man who believes he is Don Quixote himself, unwilling to give up on his imaginative dreams. It is a film that only Terry Gilliam could have made, and nothing was going to stop him from doing so.
The narrative isn’t that different from The Fisher King, in the way that film also played with fantasy elements and presented us with a character with an arguably loose grip on reality. However, Gilliam’s script (co-written by Tony Grisoni yes, one letter different from our protagonist) is itself a commentary on a filmmaker returning to the scene of his cinematic past. How Toby used and arguably broke Javier and Angelica years earlier is clearly in some ways the product of a filmmaker coming to terms with his own behavior and career. In a sense, there’s a bit of both Toby and Javier in Gilliam—the cynical filmmaker and the wide-eyed dreamer. It’s almost like watching a man deal with the two halves of his personality through storytelling …
It is a defiantly unfocused and muddled film—but it is all of those things in a manner that reflects both the fuzzy worldview of its protagonist and the passion of its creator. Terry Gilliam has become one of cinema’s Don Quixotes, a man who refuses to give up and has a tendency to close his eyes before he leaps. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote should be messy, and don’t kid yourself into thinking that this kind of messy is easy. It’s not lazy filmmaking as much as it is passion for the form bursting forth in every scene, to the point that the characters start to even comment on it—Toby is advised at one point late in the film to ‘Try to keep up with the plot’ and his response is, ‘There’s a plot?!?’ (Don Quixote is often very funny, which is something Gilliam hasn’t been in a long time, and adds to the delight in watching it.)
So what does it all mean? After three decades of trying to get the same movie made, what have we learned? As cheesy as it sounds, Gilliam believes that the world needs Don Quixotes. It needs people with vivid imaginations and unshakeable moral cores. Gilliam has made a number of films about how fantasy can impact and even illuminate emotional truth. Thank God he’s still out there, tilting at windmills for all of us.”
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April 19th – Fast Color (2018), directed by Julia Hart
From Kenneth Turan at The Los Angeles Times:
“Fast Color is a nifty little film, a smart, adventurous and surprising production made with visible care and considerable love. It’s also a superhero movie with strong science fiction elements, but nothing like the way we’re used to seeing them. While movies of the Marvel and DC variety are today’s movie establishment, the genre’s origins are raffish and independent, and it’s good to see director Julia Hart going back to those roots and doing things a little differently.
So not only is the protagonist and unwilling tower of Ruth a woman of color, her powers turn out to be multi-generational, passed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter. In fact, you could argue that celebrating the power of women is central to what Fast Color is about. But if that sounds as though it’s edging into soapbox territory, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Edgy and disturbing, Fast Color (co-written by Hart and producer Jordan Horowitz) keeps its messaging subtle as it involves us in its story.”
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April 26th – Avengers: Endgame (2019), directed by Anthony Russo & Joe Russo
From Steven D. Greydanus at National Catholic Register:
“As regards its biggest obligation, the hole in the universe left when Josh Brolin’s monstrous Thanos snapped his fingers in Infinity War, wiping out half of all living creatures in the universe, Endgame delivers to an impressive degree. For me, going into Endgame — indeed, walking out of Infinity War — the criteria for a satisfying resolution were straightforward: There must be no simple reset. No mere rolling back the clock; no going back in time and preventing the apocalypse from ever happening in the first place. Whatever has happened has really happened, and whatever happens afterward, the narrative must roll forward, not backward. Above all, there can be no substantial reversal of fortune without real sacrifice. This, in fact, is precisely the challenge the filmmakers set for themselves in Endgame.
First, although the question of time travel does come up, the possibility of merely rolling back the clock is explicitly and persuasively rejected. For once, a movie contemplating different timelines and alternate realities embraces the only rational view of time travel: The past cannot be undone. The reason is this: Even if you go back in time and change things, what you’re really doing is creating a new timeline branching off from the original. However improved your new timeline might be, the original, unimproved timeline continues to roll on in its own separate reality. It might be nice for you living in the new timeline, but it wouldn’t help the poor souls left behind in the original …
In Back to the Future: Part II, Doc Brown and Marty left an unconscious Jennifer on a porch swing in the hellish alternate 1985 dominated by a deliberately Donald Trump-like casino and real-estate tycoon Biff Tannen. Doc claimed that, if they went back to 1955 and prevented young Biff from enriching himself with the sports almanac from the future, reality would reconfigure around Jennifer and she’d be fine.
Endgame isn’t content with such convenient temporal revisionism. The returning Civil War and Infinity War creative team (screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and directors Anthony and Joe Russo) commit to an impressive degree to the timeline we know, to the reality bereaved of half its inhabitants and the characters left behind by Thanos’ finger snap. This is the reality our heroes must live with and attempt to mitigate or improve as best they can. This means that, for almost the first time in MCU history, characters are given at least some time and space to breathe, to let events sink in, to cope or not to cope, as the case may be …”
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May 10th – Tolkien (2019), directed by Dome Karukoski
From Matthew Turner at The List:
“Karukoski effectively cuts between three stories: Tolkien’s romance with Edith Bratt (Mimi Keene, then Lily Collins), a fellow resident of his care home; his academic career, first at a prestigious Birmingham school, where he forms an artistic club with his three best friends, and later at Oxford; and his traumatic experiences in the trenches of WWI, where his faithful lieutenant (Craig Roberts) just so happens to be called Sam.
As that connection suggests, the film takes an extremely on-the-nose approach when it comes to events in Tolkien’s life foreshadowing his art. It may be clumsy in places (the ‘fellowship’ theme is particularly overused), but it does allow for some impressive visuals, most notably when the trenches are attacked with terrifying, dragon-breath-like flame-throwers. Hoult cuts a charismatic, thoughtful figure in the lead and Collins is extremely charming as Edith – there’s a touching chemistry between them that works well. There’s also strong support from Anthony Boyle as the most sensitive of Tolkien’s friends and a predictably eccentric turn from Derek Jacobi as the esteemed Oxford professor who recognises Tolkien’s genius with language.”
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May 10th – The Biggest Little Farm (2018), directed by John Chester
From Tomris Laffly at RogerEbert.com:
“The Biggest Little Farm, featuring two modern-day heroes who resurrected a once-barren farm outside of Los Angeles, is the sleeper hit of this year’s festival. Just seven years ago, John and Molly Chester were living an urban life as a photographer and personal chef, respectively. But to keep their promise to their nervous dog and give him an environment in which he can find happiness and peace, they left their chaotic, crammed lives behind and started from scratch as traditional farmers, eventually resurrecting an entire ecosystem with their tireless efforts, aided by knowledgeable experts and young people from around the world who flock in to learn these old-school methods. The Biggest Little Farm is the hopeful parting note I’m leaving Telluride with; in awe of planet earth’s ability to regenerate and remembering it’s never too late to make a meaningful contribution. As a nation who once landed on the Moon, perhaps there is a thing or two we can do around here too, in order to reverse the damage we’ve caused in the persistent footsteps of the Chesters.”
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May 10th – All Is True (2018), directed by Kenneth Branagh
From Rich Cline at Shadows on the Wall:
“Elton’s script is packed full of aphorisms from Shakespeare’s writings, exploring the idea of truth in a meaningful way. If something is written from the heart is it true? Are the emotions that drive us any less valid if they’re founded on falsehood? These are big ideas, and the script thankfully handles them lightly, offering the actors some superbly meaty conversations along the way. Meanwhile, Branagh directs the film with a deep-hued lushness, using natural light and rustic design to augment the themes within the characters.
All of which gives the solid cast plenty to chew on. Under odd prosthetics, Branagh is solid as a man who never gave much thought to his own achievement. As his friend the Earl of Southampton (a wonderfully twinkly McKellen) points out, Will has lived a small life compared to his carousing fellow artists, all of whom partied themselves to an early grave. Actor add flashes of personality everywhere, but Dench provides the heart. Will is so focused on grief and legacy that he’s not very likeable, while Dench’s Anne is both soulful and wonderfully matter-of-fact.”
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May 17th – The Souvenir (2019), directed by Joanna Hogg
From Ella Kemp at Culture Whisper:
“The film [is] a mood piece about two people resculpting their own identities, both independently and unavoidably bound, unlike anything a romantic narrative has been capable of doing in recent years. We see this microcosm through Julie’s eyes, but Anthony’s words and actions hold inescapable influence. The balance this creates is unpredictable, as Hogg wanders through memories with fond nostalgia as much as alarming audacity: the camera probes spaces and bodies, words linger for longer than a screen-friendly script should allow. The results are intoxicating.
What could seem incidental is in fact symptomatic of the rebelliousness of Britain in the 1980s. The signifiers of rococo painting reappear in the curved edges, the golds and creams and opulent accessories of Julie’s Knightsbridge flat. But they lie on top of an unapologetically new wave soundtrack, favouring the art rock of Joe Jackson and Robert Wyatt as much as Glen Miller’s ‘Moonlight Serenade.’ Hogg doesn’t attempt to weave one frame of reference into the other, instead letting the spheres of privilege and punk exist in parallel, contrasting but never failing to cohere. The eclectic aesthetic isn’t overly showy, as it merely honours what once was, the way it was.
The hypnotic verve of The Souvenir is one that depicts a love story with incredibly minor, mannered displays of lust or desire, and still manages to feel incandescent. The film is a quiet masterpiece, an elegant glimpse at the past that savours the dangers of those in-between years, which is still so present. It’s a film to be revisited, unpeeled, dreamt about and agonised over for years to come.”
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May 24th – Aladdin (2019), directed by Guy Ritchie
From Justin Chang at The Los Angeles Times:
“What audience is served by their busy, chintzy visuals and inferior reproductions of moments that already exist, unimprovably, in our pop-cultural memory? Aladdin, directed with slick anonymity by Guy Ritchie from a script by John August, doesn’t answer these questions so much as it slyly disarms them. No one really needs this mostly middling, fitfully funny and never unpleasant movie. And the movie itself seems cheerfully aware of that fact as it deftly lifts lines, beats, characters and songs from its 1992 predecessor, every so often punching up the comedy, wrinkling the plot and injecting a dash of politically corrective subtext …
The Genie, of course, was the original movie’s manically entertaining raison d’être, and he was also the source of much of the early concern swirling around the remake. It was clear that no one could match the gale-force comic impact of Robin Williams, whose dazzling bursts of vaudevillian lunacy and his ability to shift from one goofy persona to the next were ideally suited to the speed and dexterity of hand-drawn animation. Finally, here was a medium that could keep pace with him. Live action is in some ways a slower, more cumbersome medium, which suits Smith just fine, his own moments of song-and-dance lunacy being neither as frequent nor as inspired. When he sings ‘You ain’t never had a friend like me,’ it’s hard not to recall Williams’ much more elaborate version of the number and smile at the irony. But Smith’s interpretation has its sneaky pleasures. He makes a less quippy and in some ways pricklier Genie, less inclined to coddle Aladdin and more prone to doling out the kind of romantic advice that might remind you of the professional love guru Smith played in Hitch …
The rest of Aladdin cleaves to more straightforward lines, even as it tries to give the supporting characters greater complexity and political awareness to match their flesh-and-blood makeovers. Jasmine now has ambitions to defy the patriarchal order and succeed her father (Navid Negahban) as sultan, as she declares in the film’s lone new song — a courtyard power ballad that Scott delivers with show-stopping conviction. It’s a rousing display of storming-the-gates feminism, if also by now a somewhat perfunctory, performative one.”
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May 31st – Deadwood (2019), created by David Milch
From Matt Zoller Seitz at Vulture:
“The film’s tightly focused nature might’ve made it feel like a final summation even without the extra-dramatic frame of Milch’s Alzheimer’s, which is insinuated in fleeting exchanges — as when Brad Dourif’s Doc Cochran asks Al what day it is and he mistakenly says Tuesday when it’s Friday. The tale is suffused with a melancholy acceptance of the passage of time and the certainty of aging and death. These heavy themes were a relief to the actors, though: W. Earl Brown, who returns as Dan Dority, Al’s right-hand man, says his first reaction on reading the script was “relief, not just because it was a beautiful piece of work but because the fact that it was set ten years later meant I wouldn’t have to dye my hair and go to the gym.”
… Storytelling as remembrance was always at the heart of Milch’s fiction. The show was forever contrasting the polished, neutered first draft of history, as penned by newspaperman A. W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones), with the carnal, booze-soaked, dope-addled, money-grubbing reality taking place in the gambling parlors, opium dens, brothels, and Chinatown alleyways, where corpses were fed to pigs owned by Al’s counterpart, Wu (Keone Young). The season-two opener was even titled ‘A Lie Agreed Upon’ after Napoleon’s (perhaps apocryphal) formulation explaining what ‘history’ really is. Deadwood’s only immutable realities were birth, death, love, and grief. The dead lingered in the minds of citizens, who visited their graves and spoke to them or sat silently in the margins of raucous celebrations, remembering the ones who couldn’t be there.
In retrospect, the show seems to have been building toward this bittersweet, multivalent conclusion. Like many episodes of the series, Deadwood: The Movie is about the tension between wanting things to change versus wishing they could always stay the same. It’s also about the resonating power of loss.”
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June 7th – The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), directed by Joe Talbot
From Tomris Laffly at RogerEbert.com:
“A lyrical elegy on a city’s vanishing character, The Last Black Man in San Francisco raises urgent questions around racism, gentrification and humankind’s deteriorating values through its offbeat rhythms and vivid cinematography as warm as the friendship at its heart. But to merely praise Joe Talbot’s artful film for its timeliness would do it disservice. With his directorial debut (co-written by Rob Richert, with a story credit to co-lead/Talbot’s childhood friend Jimmie Fails), Talbot has made an ageless film as dignified and dependable as its central character Jimmie; one that is proudly in touch with its roots and history and spiritually undefeated by the ceaseless injustices that aim for what one holds dear. This is bound to go down as one of the all-time-great San Francisco films.”
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June 14th – The Dead Don’t Die (2019), directed by Jim Jarmusch
From Rick Kisonak at Seven Days:
“In 2004, Jarmusch wrote in MovieMaker: ‘Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems … Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.’ … What is a sleepy burg’s law enforcement unit to do when polar fracking knocks the planet off its axis, days start staying light late into the night, and the slumber of the dead is disturbed? That’s the question posed by the script. The answer consists of an hour and 45 minutes of wry commentary, pithy banter, indelible characters and meta mind games …
When night finally falls, the dead begin rising from their graves. The first two we meet are played by Iggy Pop and the filmmaker’s significant other, Sara Driver. They set the tone for the horde to follow — slow walkers with one thing on their minds, whatever fixated them in life. Pop and Driver want coffee; a crowd huddles outside a pharmacy dreaming of Xanax; reanimated kids invade a candy store mumbling, ‘Skittles.’ True to tradition, all hunger for human flesh …
Along the way, the director is generous with oddball moments of understated humor, even poetry. RZA reunites with Jarmusch as a deliveryman who’s asked by a customer to ‘drop some wisdom.’ ‘The world is perfect,’ he offers. ‘Appreciate the details.’ There are countless details to appreciate in The Dead Don’t Die. It’s a modest, unassuming, angry fable that uses gore and goofy effects to make palatable a warning of the real horror on humanity’s horizon: Earth, because of our carelessness, coming to a dead end.”
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June 21st – Toy Story 4 (2019), directed by Josh Cooley
From Anthony Lane at The New Yorker:
“What is fresh about Toy Story 4 — what corrals a sheepish story and goads it into action—is Bo Peep (Annie Potts). Absent from the previous film, she rocks up here as a rogue toy, who has gone AWOL, ditched her polka-dotted skirt for blue pants, and overcome the addictive need to be owned. She is now, in the truest sense, self-possessed. Even more amazing, to Woody’s disbelief, she appears to like it that way.
I have admired Bo Peep since the start of Toy Story, when she sashayed past a stack of alphabet bricks, glanced back at Woody, and crooned, ‘I’m just a couple of blocks away.’ I remember thinking, O.K., it’s going to be that sort of movie: smart and shiny, with wits like pushpins and eyes peeled for every possible gag. Give me more. What I didn’t foresee was that, in the ensuing years, the Toy Story saga would dig around in the treasure chest of our lifelong obsessions — friendship, loss, the joyous longevity of our attachments, and, conversely, the dread of obsolescence — and, in the process, put to shame half of the allegedly grownup films that Hollywood supplies. The heart has its reasons, and those reasons have been most searchingly explored not by romantic comedies, snuffling weepies, or the phantasmagoria of Marvel but by the exploits of a battery-powered spaceman and a cowboy with a pull string in his back.
Thus, as Cooley’s film quickens and deepens, we get a fabulous running joke about the ‘inner voice,’ a staple of American self-will since the days of Emerson. Buzz is advised to harken to his voice before making any decisions, and so he keeps jabbing at the button on his chest—the one that issues astro-commands, instructing him to return to base, or whatever. ‘Thanks, Inner Voice!’ he cries, and sprints off. Will the purveyors of self-help books, and their millions of pliable readers, curl up like snails as they watch him? I hope so … Stick around, and you will be rewarded with a brief but remarkable conversation on the nature of existence. One toy poses a question, which I will not disclose, and another replies, ‘I don’t know.’ Socrates would be proud of them.”
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June 28th – Ophelia (2018), directed by Claire McCarthy
From David Edelstein at Vulture:
“The neo-Shakespeare movie Ophelia is an audacious stunt. The novelist Lisa Klein began with the character who might have the least agency in any great drama (arguably the greatest of all dramas). In Hamlet, Ophelia is bullied and bounced around by three men: her prissy father, Polonius; the bloat King Claudius; and her boyfriend, the Danish prince himself. With her father skewered and boyfriend (his killer) decamped for England, she delivers a famously lyrical mad scene and promptly drowns. Millais immortalized her floating corpse in a famous painting that inspired Olivier’s final shot of her in his Hamlet. And wouldn’t you know that the movie Ophelia begins with a reproduction of that shot — except that Ophelia is played by the first female Jedi and, in voice-over, says to forget what we know. She’ll tell her own story, thank you very much.
This is the ultimate female take-back-the-narrative movie, and frankly a lot of it is silly and sophomoric. But it’s also juicy and fun and was a crowd-pleaser at the Sundance Film Festival premiere — it got the most sustained applause of any movie I saw.
The screenwriter Semi Chellas and director Claire McCarthy play a kind of footsie with Hamlet. In every instance in which Shakespeare’s Ophelia is helpless and indecisive, McCarthy and Chellas give us a young woman (Daisy Ridley) who knows her own mind better than Hamlet knows his. When this Ophelia is ordered to pry info from Hamlet (George MacKay) while Claudius (Clive Owen) and Polonius hide behind a balustrade, our heroine declaims variations of the lines we know while whispering to Hamlet that he’s being watched. His command to go to a nunnery is for her protection, given the regicide he’s planning. Of course Ophelia stays. Danger is her middle name.”
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July 12th – The Farewell (2019), directed by Lulu Wang
From Mae Abdulbaki at The Young Folks:
“In an interview with /Film, Lulu Wang, The Farewell’s writer and director, reinforced the distinction between being Chinese and Chinese American. ‘When you’re an immigrant, you fall somewhere on a spectrum, and so you’re constantly negotiating between different cultures,’ she says. And this is exactly the subtext that lies within the intricate folds of the The Farewell. Blanketed by sadness that both comforts and creates waves of internal turmoil, Wang’s film is a masterclass in storytelling and in understanding the immigrant experience, the complicated dynamics of family, and the loneliness that stems from keeping secrets, even if it’s for one’s own good …
Wang creates moments that are incredibly poignant and captures Billi’s interiority so intimately, making it easy to get into her headspace. The examination of family is multi-dimensional, from the distance between Billi and her parents to the loneliness of being ‘other’ in a country that fights for you to be one or the other, and the unexpected closeness that stems from the simple fact of wanting to keep loved ones from worrying. The Farewell makes the distinction between cultures without infringing on either and allows the audience to live in the divide of the conflict with the utmost of empathy. The Farewell is a gift, a stunning, emotional, and nuanced piece of storytelling that will indeed make you want to call your grandmother afterward.”
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July 19th – The Lion King (2019), directed by Jon Favreau
From Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com:
“The 1994 version was Hamlet plus Bambi on the African veldt: a childhood-shaping, Oscar-winning blockbuster, the second-highest grossing feature film of its calendar year, one of the last great hand-drawn Disney animated features (Pixar’s original Toy Story came out 18 months later), and a tear-producing machine. This remake was controversial long before it opened, mainly because it seemed to take the Walt Disney company’s new branding strategy — remaking beloved animated films as CGI-dependent ‘live action’ spectaculars — to its most drastic conclusion. It’s serves up the same story with different actors, slightly different arrangements of familiar songs and soundtrack cues, a couple of original tunes, a few entirely fresh scenes and sequences, and, of course, photorealistic animals. The latter are the movie’s main selling point, so believable that one of my kids remarked afterward that sitting through the film was like watching a nature documentary on mute while the soundtrack to original The Lion King played in the background …
There are times when the movie clears out music and dialogue and just lets you hear natural sounds and watch lions, giraffes, elephants, birds, rodents, and insects move through the frame. This movie uses the motif of “light” more subtly than the original, because it’s striving to look real rather than stylized, and the result is a great example of how CGI animation can achieve a different kind of poetic effect that’s different from the kind that old-fashioned cel animators might do. When Mufasa tells young Simba that his domain is “everything the light touches,” the scene is illuminated by a golden, dawn-like glow, and when they have what proves to be their final conversation before Mufasa’s death (that’s not a spoiler, Hamlet is 400 years old) the sunlight ebbs and gives way to darkness, and the sky fills with stars, foreshadowing Mufasa taking his place among the ghosts of kings and queens above. A sequence two-thirds of the way through takes a brief transitional bit from the original—Rafiki the baboon realizing that Simba is still alive by catching his scent in the wind—and builds a long, elegant, chain-reaction sequence around it, with a tuft of Simba’s fur traveling, like the Forrest Gump feather, from the Eden-like jungle where he’s exiled himself to the pridelands.
And while the photorealism of the animals snuffs out any possibility of subtle “human” facial expressions, the creatures’ bodies provide more characterization detail than you might expect. Particularly impressive is the way Scar’s physique contrasts with Mufasa’s. The former is angular and skewed, a Mick Jagger or David Bowie sort of body that lopes and limps, while the latter is a magnificent bruiser like Dave Bautista or Dwayne Johnson, so thick and powerful that when he moves, you can imagine the air parting around him. When Scar licks his paw and grooms himself absentmindedly as his brother pontificates, the gesture comes across as decadent and contemptuous even though it looks like something a real lion would do. That’s filmmaking magic of a different kind than was contained in the source, and it’s not necessarily lesser. What distinguishes all these choices is that they aren’t blatantly trying to re-create or pay homage to something that viewers loved in an original work, in order to comfort us and press our nostalgia buttons. That means they stand on their own two paws, making unflattering comparison difficult.”
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July 26th – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), directed by Quentin Tarantino
From David Bentley Hart at The New York Times:
“Over the years I’ve made the acquaintance of many philosophers of religion and a few theologians who dabble in the practice of theodicy: the attempt, that is, to justify ‘God’s ways’ (supposedly) by arguing for some meaning, purpose or metaphysical necessity in the evils of nature and history. Usually, the proposed solution has something to do with the clarifying contrast with goodness that evil provides, its utility in teaching us (or, in some particularly silly theologies, teaching God) compassion or ethical commitment or something of the sort. No light without shadow, no love without hate, no pity without cruelty — that sort of thing. All of which is quite nonsensical.
My own metaphysical dispositions are very different (and, as it happens, of more ancient pedigree). I tend to believe that goodness, love and moral beauty are substantial and eternal realities that attest to themselves quite immediately to any rational nature, without the need for any edifying ‘contrast’ to make them intelligible. No one, I think, actually learns pity from cruelty. The ‘ontological status’ of evil (to use the jargon of the philosophers) is one of pure contingency, inevitable perhaps, but adding nothing necessary to the form and fabric of reality. After all, a good that required evil to become actual would always be only a conditional good at best, one probably not worth its price. Those who argue for the necessity of evil in the abstract, surely, would also generally lament any specific evil in the concrete, and would gladly unmake many evils of the past if only they could. But then, once one grants that it would be virtuous to undo any past evil in particular, one really cannot plausibly argue for evil’s metaphysical necessity in general. And who would be so callous or morally confused as not to want to go back and prevent the evils of the past? …
There is, that is to say, an ethics of the counterfactual. And in a sense, no other genuine ethical impulse is possible, if only because in this world the good is, as often as not, a contradiction of the true (or, at least, the factual). At one level, the willful, slightly perverse pretense that the past did not happen as it did may be only an impotent gesture of resentment at reality; at another, however, it is an authentically moral defiance of any ‘wisdom’ that tries to make peace with the sheer meaningless contingency of evil. Contrary to the prudent ‘realism’ of those who burden the world with theodicies, it is this moral longing for the counterfactual — for the total cosmic justice that history rarely embodies — that informs and animates the most truly redemptive forms of religious, philosophical and social moral yearning.
The artistic masterstroke in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood comes at the very end, after the beautifully brutal denouement …”
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August 2nd – Them That Follow (2019), directed by Britt Poulton & Dan Madison Savage
From Kate Erbland at Indiewire:
“Mara is a true believer, and Them That Follow isn’t a film about a cloistered young person attempting to break free of the seemingly cultish trappings of their faith. As she fervently prays for God to remedy her situation and gift her with a new and ‘clean heart,’ Englert’s striking performance pushes a seemingly cliche character into fresh spaces. It’s not that she wants out, but she can’t help wanting more, a pickle no amount of praying can help (much as she fervently believes otherwise).
She’s surrounded by folks just as dedicated to their faith, with Poulton and Savage assembling a righteously talented cast that includes Kaitlyn Dever as her heartbreaking best friend Dilly and Oscar-winner Olivia Colman as a converted devotee also adept at avoiding character expectations. Lewis Pullman, who possesses his actor father Bill’s same everyman charm, is the faithful congregant who hopes to marry Mara, while Thomas Mann is the church dropout she really loves.
Despite the abiding nature of their faith, there’s little joy in the community. Cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz washes out their world in dark shadows, cloudy grays, and a flat palette that telegraphs desperation without being heavy-handed. Houses are dim, damp, and crowded. Even outdoor scenes are claustrophobic, with the trees pushing in a little too close. Something else is closing in, too: the cops, who have been through Lemuel’s church before, and have never taken kindly to the dangerous way he goes about expressing his faith.”
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September 20th – Ad Astra (2019), directed by James Gray
From Nguyen Le at InSession Film:
“Gray and Ethan Gross’ script may have placed the film in an advanced, beautiful and, most importantly, hopeful future — International Space Antenna! Commercial deep-space flights! Applebee’s on the moon! Pirates on rovers! — but their interest is in building the character more than the world, making clear the dives into one man’s heart and sprinkling the background with humankind’s thus-far steps all over the starry expanse. Pitt is certainly up to the task for this approach, using his eyes and head turns to audibly highlight the reactions to revelations. A standout would be when Roy gets summoned by the higher-ups of SpaceCom and hears how his father is responsible for the devastation: All the limited physical movements Pitt employs are just right and enough to deliver this observation home, as well as crisply reflecting Roy’s spiritual tug-of-war between the man on a mission and the man buried by all the missions. Often repeated is how calm Roy is in any situation, which is nice when you’re, say, freefalling from stratospheric heights (an opener vertiginously photographed by Interstellar’s d.p. Hoyte van Hoytema), but is calmness appropriate when he is about to face the familial star he deems an enigma, his superiors have made mythic and yet reportedly the scourge? Will whatever shell Roy has built be punctured the closer he reaches his goal? These questions orbit the mind, and never cease to, throughout Ad Astra, guaranteeing visibility to the human costs of the voyage. The brothers Nolan’s work on Interstellar, despite that same focus, often falls victim to the spectacle and spectacular theories.
As for the other half of the opening sentence, look to the flag that Ad Astra waves. After every stage of the journey, methodically plotted out by the script in the form of each subsequent planet Roy rockets toward, there will be a moment — and accompanying monologue — that shows the realization of limits, the cause to pursue answers rather than mysteries. There is, arguably, merit in the thought that the world in the film has evolved to the point where any further search for an answer will be hollow conquests, magnets for despair and the destroying of what has always mattered. This, too, is one of the conclusions derivable from Gray’s previous intimate epic, The Lost City of Z, which also commits the sin of underusing its actresses (but Ruth Negga’s arrival with the waves is a neat visual trick). It’s kind of daring to communicate the need to be undaring in a time when victories are said to only be recognizable if they are by the truckload, or when traits that are outright remnants get rendered as timely essentials.”
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October 4th – Joker (2019), directed by Todd Phillips
From Chris Hoke at Medium.com:
“It was refreshing to see such a tale where the lonely story of a very broken, complicated individual (not a mastermind) intersects with larger societal phenomena like class inequality and mass media, to create a chillingly plausible 2019 ‘villain’: an unwitting meme, a media-loop mask, a cracked psyche lifted onto television screen for ratings and giggles then — after exploding in the media’s hands — lifted onto the shoulders of furious crowds, becoming the shorthand face for a fire that’s been growing across the land. I thought it was brilliant …
This idea that a villain can be a symbol of pure chaos and evil (multiple critics unsurprisingly smile back at the coin-flipping menace Anton Chigurh in McCarthy’s No County For Old Men) — I don’t think that’s a sophisticated narrative choice. It’s an old American addiction. “Opacity of motive,” as it’s called in lit classes, is rarely used in American popular narratives to instill curiosity (as it should), a troubling sense of mystery that shakes our simple formulations of human motivation (or forces a mirroring of our own, like the opacity of a darkened window). Most of the time, as with Ledger, big screen bad guys with no relevant past are just another relapse into our nation’s historical high: tossing off all burdensome sense of history. Backstory is a drag. Leave the Old World behind. America is a symbol, a New World. Indigenous people’s history on this continent? Their reasons for the torrent of arrows firing our way? They are face-painted symbols to conquer, over and over and over again …
In recent decades we as a country have made a rocky recovery (dare I say slow repentance) from this narrative. I’m talking about that long streak of material from Breaking Bad to Cobra Kai, from Making A Murderer to ‘The True Story of Three Little Pigs,’ a clever children’s book supposedly penned by the Big Bad Wolf. In this recovery trend, Phillips’ new Joker delivers a painfully sober re-imagination of our oldest Hollywood villain. Sure, he cuts the shape from Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, but he pastes this more mature psychology into our favorite comic book mythos of Good Vs. Evil. Not perfection, as recovery groups say, but progress. Progress on the big screen …
The No Backstory Bad Guy is much easier for kids to understand. Or, kids of privilege, maybe. So it’s fitting that rich little boys — whether they become presidents or billionaire caped avengers — rise into American hero roles with fancy weapons to blow them all away. We turn out at the ballot box and the box office alike in surprising numbers every time. It’s our jam …
I’ve spent my adult life hearing the stories of the troubled folks in our local jail. We exchange letters when they’re shipped around the state. I press my forehead to cold bullet proof glass at solitary confinement cell-front visitations that took weeks of emails and paperwork to clear. I accompany them after release in my own car to mental hospitals, treatment centers, chemical dependency evaluations, and long rides to immigration hearings. I’ve scrambled to find new education solutions for gang-involved teenagers, medical funding for mental health meds, always when funding is cut and no one seems to care or be listening. Phillips’ and Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck Joker story makes massive imaginative contact with this world, as I and many others know it.
There’s a scene where Arthur steals the old case file on his mother when she was detained as criminally psychotic at Arkham State Hospital. Panting, hiding in a stairwell, he reads the reports of his young, addicted mother suffering assault and battery at the hands of boyfriends in the home, who together left her small boy Arthur tied to the radiator, where he was found (medical photos flip by) with aggravated signs of head trauma. I wanted to cry or vomit at this scene. I thought of my wife’s initial Hell No to seeing this. I would argue it’s diagnostically sociopathic as a culture to not have some natural sob-reflex at these stories. Another review called the revelation of such a backstory ‘manipulative.’ That tells me at least this person felt something, and resented being made to feel it. But, sadly, this is the only world most of the bad guys I’ve met know. They resent having to feel what they were made to feel, too. Get it? Joker gets it right.”
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November 1st – Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), directed by Tim Miller
From Emily Asher-Perrin at Tor.com:
“The premise is simple enough, but it cannot effectively communicate what it means to see the Terminator film series own up to its true power and amplify it tenfold. This is a sci-fi action film centered on not one, but three women. Each of them is unique, each of them is important, and each of them is permitted a complete arc that highlights their strengths and vulnerabilities. Sarah can barely contain her disgust for what’s happening to Dani, the assumed mother of another key to the resistance. She already knows what it feels like to be reduced to her status as a bearer of some sort of future messiah, and how being reduced to that status doesn’t make being a savior better or more meaningful. All those years running and hiding have allowed her to save the world over and over, but it doesn’t allow her anything real to hang onto. She drinks each night until she blacks out. She’s forgetting what her son ever looked like. There’s no home base for her, no friends or family to make the purpose bearable.
Then there’s Grace, whom Davis infuses with such intensity and power that she’s frequently hypnotizing. No one else so seamlessly melds intimidation with intense devotion. Grace’s body has been tuned and enhanced for her mission, but she’s still human, and with that humanity come certain limitations. Her body breaks down and requires medicines to bring her back to fighting shape. So, all of her power still requires her to be exposed, to both Dani and Sarah, in order to continue protecting Dani. We get the enjoyment of watching Grace do so many of the things that only Terminators can do, but this time with all the humanity attached, all the prickly emotions and entanglements that brings.
Reyes’s portrayal of Dani is stunning, as we’re forced to reckon with a new woman thrust into Sarah’s old position as Most Important Woman in the World. But Dani’s life isn’t like Sarah’s—before the Rev-9 arrives and destroys her life, she is already responsible for taking care of everyone in her orbit. She has a father and brother to protect, a job at a factory that is intent on replacing people with machines. Sarah Connor’s destiny seemed to come out of nowhere, but with Dani, we see a woman already deeply committed to looking out for others, fighting for them, demanding better of them. Dani Ramos doesn’t have the luxury of partying through her twenties with no perceived direction. Though the terms of her life are not quite so bombastic before a Terminator shows up, she was already operating with the wisdom and forceful purpose of someone twice her age and experience …
Dark Fate has politics in play that are extremely relevant to this exact moment in time, and it smartly doesn’t shy away from them. A hefty portion of the film’s action is dedicated to a perilous cross at the U.S./Mexican border, one which sees Dani, Sarah, and Grace caught and placed in holding pens while the Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna) hunts them down. Grace is injured and taken for medical attention, and when she wakes and demands to know where the prisoners are being kept, one of the guards tries to correct her by saying ‘detainees’—Grace isn’t having it. The fact that the film devotes so much focus to the concept of the new world savior being kept in a cage (and almost killed) for crossing a border illegally is something the audience must engage with. The fact that said savior is also a Mexican woman who spends much of the film speaking Spanish is equally important. These elements only add to Dark Fate’s relevance as a story, making it more grounded than ever.”
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November 1st – Light from Light (2019), directed by Paul Harrill
From Jeffrey Overstreet at Looking Closer:
“Most mainstream moviemakers would take this premise and head straight for the jump-scares. And, let’s face it — they’d probably also tease us with the potential of romantic chemistry between Richard and Shelia. But Harrill makes no moves to cultivate a love story between them — Richard is too wounded and Shelia is too preoccupied with her own history of losses, and he’s wise to keep them focused. We don’t get a lot of detail about either character — just enough to know that Richard deeply loved Suzanne and longs to connect with her again, and that Shelia’s love life has been a discouraging series of disappointments.
No, this is not, after all, a film about ghosts, although the possibility of a ghost is what brings Shelia and Richard together for soul-searching and friendship. This is a film about daring to risk belief in spite of failures. Shelia is so jaded on the subject of love that she can’t resist interfering in the budding relationship between her son Owen (Josh Wiggins, winningly awkward) and his sweetheart Lucy (the radiant Atheena Frizzell). ‘I just don’t want you to get hurt,’ Shelia tells him. And her attitude has consequences. Soon, Owen is indoctrinated: ‘What’s the point of falling in love if it’s not going to last?’ he asks, much to Lucy’s disappointment.
And yet, for all of her insistence on permanence and certainty, Shelia seems driven to track rumors of ghosts, setting up cameras and microphones, and stalking the shadows of Richard’s house by night, repeating an earnest appeal: ‘If you want to communicate, let yourself be known.’ … For all of this talk about making contact with the dearly departed, the movie keeps insisting on the value of the present and attentive. Both involve risk, and both can lead to harmful discoveries. But love is impossible without faith, and faith is risk — it’s a gamble, a choice to live in confidence of something hoped for, a choice to make choices based on things uncertain and unseen. Love leans us forward, a posture that causes a lot of strain and sometimes topples us over.”
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November 1st – Motherless Brooklyn (2019), directed by Edward Norton
From Alexanddra Heller-Nicholas at The Blue Lenses:
“Like the novel, the film takes the framework of the classic hardboiled detective story and reworks it into a neo-noir that is as notable for how it undermines the clichés of the form as much as it upholds them. Aside from being written and directed by Norton, he also stars as the film’s central character, Lionel Essrog, who works for a detective agency run by Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) alongside a group of other men Minna brought together during their early life in an abuse-ridden Catholic orphanage.
Nicknamed ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ by Frank in their youth, despite the often socially awkward manifestation of the symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome and seeming position at the bottom of the agency’s hierarchy, Frank held particular affection for Lionel and recognised the value of his ability to remember small details to an almost supernatural degree. When Frank is killed, Lionel decides to investigate the crime himself and is drawn into a high-stakes game of political intrigue, racial politics and gentrification.
As a world-building exercise, noir has long offered a rich terrain for filmmakers to expand not just their stylistic skills, but to dig deep into the nooks and crannies of character, dialogue and ideology, with a particular focus in the latter on masculinity itself. Motherless Brooklyn is a love-letter to the long-held focus across film noir on masculinity in crisis, but through Lethem’s source material and Norton’s deep engagement with it, something genuinely fresh explodes out of seemingly familiar material … Motherless Brooklyn ‘gets’ film noir; it ‘gets’ Lethem; and, perhaps most importantly, in its tale of the corruption that leads to the building of a future New York, it’s fearless in its political engagement in terms of what is at stake and what is lost when epic visions overtake the value of tight-knit communities.”
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November 1st – Harriet (2019), directed by Kasi Lemmons
From Joe Friar at The Victoria Advocate:
“Cynthia Erivo’s spirited performance as the heroic Harriet Tubman who escaped slavery to become a freedom fighter for the Underground Railroad (and who should be on the $20 bill right now) is the highlight of the first biopic about the American abolitionist, suffragist, political activist and humanitarian.
Long overdue, Harriet from writer-director Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou) undertakes the rigorous task of telling this extraordinary story in just more than two hours. The result is a thorough and inspiring film with good performances that should become required viewing in classrooms around the country …
When Harriet was a teenager she incurred a traumatic head injury, which led to seizures and visions that she credited as messages from God. While some historians have suggested the famed abolitionist may have suffered from epilepsy or narcolepsy, Lemmons takes the divine intervention approach as Harriet’s blackouts are seen as supernatural phenomena or premonitions. Either way, for those who have faith, it’s easy to believe the Lord played a hand in her miraculous endeavor.”
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November 8th – Midway (2019), directed by Roland Emmerich
From Neil Morris at Chatham News & Record:
“Perhaps today’s world craves stories with a clear delineation of good and evil. Maybe the passage of time and historical imperative necessitates remembering last century’s war heroes. Either way, Emmerich’s Midway exceeds any reasonable expectations. It doesn’t break any molds, but it’s an earnest attempt at memorializing this historically significant event and its key contributors …
The most intriguing segments of Midway are the competing cat-and-mouse military tactics, as strategists on both sides try to crack codes and outwit their opponents. Midway Island represents a strategic foothold for both America and Japan — if Japan could capture Midway, its air bases could serve as launching points for raids on Hawaii and even the western contidental U.S. Meanwhile, U.S. strategists are can use Japan’s desire for Midway to set a trap that could reshift the balance of power in the Pacific.
Emmerich particularly shines a spotlight on the contributions of Layton and Dick Best (Ed Skrein), an ace American pilot whose aviation exploits culminated with bombing two Japanese carriers during the Battle of Midway. While Emmerich relies a bit heavily on the blur of CGI throughout Midway, one virtue of his visual palette is that it effectively captures the hellish heroism of dive bombing, with pilots asked to fly directly into a hail tracer fire, often while being pursued by enemy planes from the rear. Few pilots return alive, each of them accepting that the sacrifice of a few is worth the destruction of an entire warship or aircraft carrier.”
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November 15th – The Good Liar (2019), directed by Bill Condon
From Michael Calleri at The Niagara Gazette:
“In The Good Liar, McKellen plays Roy, a con artist, who, with his partner-in-crime Vincent (Jim Carter, a pleasure to watch), sets his sights on Mirren’s lonely Betty, who is clearly made up of still waters that run deep. Roy finds himself actually liking his prim and proper mark. Will this ruin the hoped-for $3-million score? Or is Betty playing a cautious cat-and-mouse game of her own?
I enjoyed this Alfred Hitchcock-style tale immensely and recommend it. There are numerous sequences with Mirren and McKellen acting against each other, and these moments crackle. There’s great satisfaction in watching a well-made, richly-detailed mystery that tells a carefully constructed story. Throughout the movie, there are small hints about momentous revelations to come. The Good Liar has plenty of delights to satisfy caper fans and devotees of on-screen duplicity. For those dedicated to seeing the finest acting possible, it’s magical.”
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November 22nd – A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), directed by Marielle Heller
From Jeffrey Overstreet at Looking Closer:
“Here’s a film that takes a complicated story about adults in conflict and frames it as if it’s the focus of an episode of children’s television. No, I don’t mean the movie’s styled like the hyperactive, seizure-inducing children’s entertainment of today, but rather it’s played in the mode of the patient, modest, and deeply nourishing educational television provided by Fred Rogers from 1968 through 2001 …
The movie introduces Lloyd Vogler (Matthew Rhys), a journalist for Esquire magazine, who is happily married to Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson)’ unhappily clashing with his estranged father (Chris Cooper); intolerant of his father’s girlfriend (Wendy Makkena); and trying to make his peace with his own new role as a father. Their family tensions are just mundane enough (and just realistic enough, actually) to make for forgettable drama — but what makes them interesting is how their story is introduced by, and eventually visited by, a sort of guardian angel who just might bring this warring tribe around into an affirmation that, yes indeed, it is a wonderful life.
That soft-spoken savior, who earned his wings a long time ago, and whose guardian-angel status was celebrated just last year in the extraordinarily moving documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, is, of course, Mr. Rogers — the educator, psychologist, pastor, and television host we associate with bringing peace, truth, and love to small children …
Everything about this premise would incline me to believe that Heller’s movie would seem condescending to its adult audience. I was braced for a barrage of oversimplifications meant to resolve tensions in a a complicated reality. and for platitudes likely to inspire more cynicism than healing. But something kept me hopeful. I’d seen Heller’s last film — Can You Ever Forgive Me?, the messy and difficult portrait of author and fraud artist Lee Israel. And I couldn’t imagine that this director would settle for something sentimental and sticky. She hasn’t. In fact, Heller makes things unexpectedly exciting in that she isn’t content to provide a mere imitation of Fred Rogers’ tenderness, creativity, and imagination.”
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November 22nd – Dark Waters (2019), directed by Todd Haynes
From Steve Prokopy at Third Coast Review:
“Although the late fall is certainly known for being the place where hard-hitting dramas, ripe for awards consideration, often land, I don’t think I was quite prepared for just how much of a poignant gut punch of a film Dark Waters, the latest from Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Carol), truly is. In the true-life story of Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), a corporate defense attorney specializing in chemical company litigation, he decides to help out a farmer friend (the fantastic Bill Camp) of his grandmother. The farmer’s land, livestock, and family have been ravaged by the pollution from a DuPont chemical plant that leaked run-off into the water supply and, it turns out, has a long history of such pollution …
The film also does a compelling job illustrating just how draining and all-consuming Bilott’s struggle was. It takes a toll on his health, his relationships, his salary, his sanity, and his time (the scope of the film is about 20 years). The role gives Ruffalo the chance to really throw himself into the work, reminding us of the kind of acting he was capable of before the Hulk took over his life (that’s not a knock at his Marvel work, but this is clearly something different). Equally chilling is the way Dark Waters shows how powerful corporations maneuver their way into smaller towns with money, jobs and influence, and so completely take over that to have them leave town or cut back in any way would destroy an entire community. This cycle breeds towns full of defenders of the very companies that might also be killing them …
Dark Waters is the type of worthy activist filmmaking that feels like a committed passion project that actually works on both an emotional level and one that will make viewers angry beyond words. The last few title cards about the true scope of the damage done by DuPont are extraordinary and horrifying, and make the rest of the film feel entirely justified and quite necessary as a piece of filmmaking and a way to make a complicated situation all too clear. It might not be ideal holiday or family viewing, but if you want to be shaken to your core and give your brain something to ponder, perhaps for the rest of your life, Dark Waters is ideal.”
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November 22nd – Frozen II (2019), directed by Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee
From Clarisse Loughrey at The Independent:
“Frozen 2, Disney’s sequel to its $1.3bn hit, is more mature, ambitious, and intricate than its predecessor. That doesn’t automatically make it better – Frozen’s success was built on a simple and relatable story of sisterly love – but it’s different enough not to feel like a stale rerun. There are surprises here to uncover, and a renewed sense of energy to the proceedings. Admittedly, the film does play with fire by taking the same path as other sequels, padding out a character’s backstory in the hope it’ll add depth to their world. There are echoes of last month’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, as Queen Elsa (Menzel) is carted off to a magical place that might provide a few answers about where she comes from. But Frozen 2 succeeds where so many others have failed …
Frozen 2 has an authenticity that immediately separates it from so many other subpar follow-ups. Its worldbuilding not only feels earned, but meaningful. Returning directors Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck ensure that every frame is exquisitely detailed and rich with colour: we move gracefully from autumn leaves to the pinkish glow of ethereal fire, then on to stormy, grey waves and shimmering ice crystals. Certain sequences here are even more spectacular than the creation of Elsa’s ice castle, with the filmmakers now more confident to step out of reality and deliver something truly jaw-dropping. Lee’s screenplay, too, makes some bold choices. She teases out several compelling ideas: environmentalism, reparations, exploitation and how we should confront the past. It’s all vague enough that it could be applied to a hundred different real-world situations, which perhaps makes it all the more powerful as a learning tool for families.
But Frozen 2 doesn’t lose itself in rootless ambition. It works because we’re guided through these strange, unfamiliar surroundings by the steady hands of Elsa, Anna, Kristoff, Sven, and Olaf – characters with whom we’re all very much familiar (or, for some parents, exhaustingly familiar) – and the cast sink straight back into their roles.”
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November 27th – The Irishman (2019), directed by Martin Scorsese
From Eric Eisenberg at Cinema Blend:
“It’s a film that ultimately feels like it needed every second of its 15 years of development, and while one could make the argument that it is a touch on the indulgent side (particularly pointing to the oversized 209 minute runtime), the genius of it is just how captivating it is from end to end. Outfitted with brilliant performances from some of the most talented actors around, it’s a gangster movie unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and one that only a genius like Scorsese could deliver.
Adapted from the non-fiction Charles Brandt book I Heard You Paint Houses by screenwriter Steven Zaillian, The Irishman is a sweeping tale that looks back on almost the entirety of the 20th century through the eyes of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who we first meet as a lonely septuagenarian living by himself in a retirement home. His story unfolds in non-linear fashion, tracing his life from his time as a soldier in World War II through his rise as a powerful union official and member of the Bufalino crime family – a particularly detailing his time working alongside one of the most influential figures in American history, Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) …
Between Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed, Martin Scorsese has already firmly established himself as the master of the gangster film, but The Irishman is larger in scale than anything he’s ever done before, and it’s stunning just how utterly captivating it is at every moment. While this certainly is a story that features more than a few shocking and violent moments, as Frank Sheeran was very far from a pacifist, they are hardly what drives the movie. The gunshots and death grab you, but what holds you is the endless intensity of these characters and choices they are driven to make in the same of prosperity and survival …
Of course, the visual effects don’t work if you’re not convinced by the performances underneath… but that’s where it helps that Martin Scorsese has assembled what is the best ensemble cast of his career. Collaborating with the director for the first time in nearly 25 years, Robert De Niro is truly back in top form here, taking audiences on an emotional journey through a deeply complicated life, and convincingly disappearing into the part every step of the way. As the bombastic Jimmy Hoffa, Al Pacino is giving free reign to do what he does best – go seriously big at every opportunity – and his contrasting energy opposite De Niro’ Sheeran results in much of the movie’s best drama.
At the crossroads of everything great about The Irishman, though, is the work done by Joe Pesci – which is simply next level. It’s a supporting role in the most literal sense, as he plays Russell Bufalino, the man who befriends Frank Sheeran and takes him under his wing in the Bufalino crime family, but it’s remarkable to see what he’s able to do injecting nuance into the part, particularly because he’s been almost entirely absent from the acting world for the last 20 years. The very real love that Russell has for Frank is palpable and essential to the story being told, and it’s performed in a way nobody other than Pesci could do.”
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November 29th – Queen & Slim (2019), directed by Melina Matsoukas
From Sheila O’Malley at RogerEbert.com:
“The title credit of Melina Matsoukas’ debut feature, Queen & Slim is startling: gigantic yellow letters against a black background, with the enormity of the font establishing the gigantic scope of the film. There’s something epic about it, like the names already mean something, have a resonance beyond the two humans they represent. The opening scene that follows is in direct opposition to the title credit: two unnamed characters sit in a diner, in the midst of an awkward Tinder date. There is a visible lack of chemistry. She (Jodie Turner-Smith) reached out to him (Daniel Kaluuya), because she had a bad day and didn’t want to be alone. He prays before eating his meal, and she can barely contain an eyeroll. It’s pretty clear this won’t just be the first date, it’ll also be the last. But events conspire against that normal and expected outcome. On the drive home, they’re pulled over by a cop for a minor traffic violation. Things turn ugly, the cop is an aggressive and trigger-happy racist, but in the ensuing scuffle—it’s the cop who ends up shot dead. Terrified, the couple decide to flee the scene.
They don’t just flee the scene. They flee their lives as they once knew them. They toss their cell phones out the window. They drive, moving forward, always forward, attempting to get to Florida. They wonder if they can somehow make it to Cuba. There will be no going back. Meanwhile, the dash cam footage of the altercation with the cop goes viral, and the two become reluctant folk heroes. Wherever they go, people recognize them, help them, hide them: it’s a modern-day Underground Railroad …
[W]here Matsoukas’ style and heart and palpable sense of purpose really works is in the quiet moments, the still moments, the moments where Queen & Slim is allowed to breathe. At 132 minutes, there’s a lot of room to breathe, and it’s a wonderful experience watching a film where the characters are given so much space. Matsoukas does not feel rushed, she does not feel like she needs to hurry them along from place to place. The film lingers in its scenes. This might be the most radical thing about Queen & Slim, its willingness to linger in the quiet in-between moments. There are very stressful sequences, but then there are other sequences, like the two of them stopping to look at horses in a field, or dancing in a backwoods blues club, finally relaxed enough to enjoy each other …
This may seem like a strange reference, but the British poet Edith Sitwell, known for her grandiose performance-art-piece readings of her own poetry, wrote in her autobiography that she wanted a ‘return to rhetoric’ in poetry, that she rejected ‘the outcry for understatement, for quietness, for neutral tints in poetry.’ I thought of this watching Queen & Slim. Queen & Slim is not interested in ‘neutral tints’ either. Or ‘understatement.’ I appreciated the ‘big mood’ of it all, even in those sequences that don’t quite work. I responded strongly to the film’s sense of scope and scale. The ‘rhetoric’ of Queen & Slim reverberates with anger and love and mourning.”
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December 13th – A Hidden Life (2019), directed by Terrence Malick
From Alissa Wilkinson at Vox:
“Instead of battlefield valor or underground daring, the latest film from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, Badlands, Days of Heaven) is a tale of something much more difficult to emulate: goodness and courage, without recognition. It’s about doing what’s right, even if it seems the results hurt more than they bring good to the world. It’s set during World War II, but our Austrian protagonist Franz Jägerstätter, based on a real-life conscientious objector, does not save Jews from Nazis or give rousing speeches. In the end, what he’s done counts for what seems like very little.
A Hidden Life is Malick’s most overtly political film and one of his most religious, urgent and sometimes even uncomfortable because of what it says — to everyone, but specifically to Christians in places where they’re the majority — about the warp and weft of courage. It’s a film that seems particularly designed to lodge barbs in a comfortable audience during an era of rising white nationalism. Jägerstätter could have lived a peaceful life if he’d simply ignored what was happening in his homeland and been willing to bow the knee to the fatherland and its fascist leader, whose aim is to establish the supremacy of Franz’s own people. But though it will bring hardship to his family and the harshest of punishments to himself, he simply cannot join the cause. The question A Hidden Life then forces us to contemplate is an uncomfortable one: Does his life, and his death, even matter? …
I was startled to see just how biting A Hidden Life is, particularly toward any Christians, or others, who might prefer their entertainment to be sentimental and comfortable. In one scene I can’t get out of my mind, an artist painting images in the nearby church tells Franz, ‘I paint their comfortable Christ, with a halo on his head … Someday I’ll paint the true Christ.’ The implication is painfully clear — that religious art prefers a Jesus who doesn’t accost one’s sensibilities, the figures who make us feel good about ourselves. We want, as the painter puts it, to look up at the pictures on the church’s ceiling and ‘imagine that if they lived in Christ’s time, they wouldn’t have done what the others did’ — in other words, if we had been around when Jesus was, we’d have known better than to execute him. When, of course, most of us most likely would have just gone along with the crowd …
A Hidden Life is everything Malick’s devotees could want from a movie: beautiful, poetic, hewing closely (particularly at the end) to films like Days of Heaven and Tree of Life. His camera observes his characters from all angles, sometimes straight on, sometimes from below, sometimes distorted in a wide-angle lens shot close to the face, creating the intimate feeling that we’re experiencing their interior lives rather than just watching passively. Its end, in which Franziska anticipates meeting Franz again — in narration that closely recalls the end of Tree of Life in particular — is a note of hope. Malick concludes, by way of a thesis, with lines from George Eliot’s Middlemarch:
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Jägerstätter’s refusal to bow the knee looked pointless in his time, but in its own way, it was a kind of heroic act, though not the kind that ordinarily merits the Hollywood treatment. The things that are not so ill with us are because people we’ll never hear about did what they had to do for people they’d never know, and who’d never know them. A hidden life is worth living, and giving up, so that others may live.”
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December 13th – Richard Jewell (2019), directed by Clint Eastwood
From Mick LaSalle at The San Francisco Chronicle:
“Obviously, Richard Jewell tells a fascinating public story about crime, the media and the government, while re-creating a comparatively happier time in America, when only an offbeat and slightly paranoid personality could possibly be concerned about an abandoned package. But what ticks this film into a higher level is the more general portrait of a man whom smart and privileged people did not want to like.
In that sense, Jewell is not just a man, but a type, and his story is a warning, not just about the excesses of power, but about our own reflexive assumptions. Paul Walter Hauser gives us the soul of a man that deserved respect even before he did something heroic, but one that people might never have noticed.
One more thing, which I hesitate to put in a review, but here goes: Everybody knows Eastwood is some kind of conservative or libertarian. Some, having seen Richard Jewell, have regarded this movie’s implicit critique of the press and FBI as ill-timed, considering the important role both are currently playing in our national life. But just as conservatives might see Richard Jewell as confirming their world view, progressives could just as easily see it as criticizing the media that gave us Donald Trump and the FBI that gave us the Comey letter. Point being: If only for two hours, please, throw away the ideological prism. That is no way to watch movies.”
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December 20th – Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), directed by J.J. Abrams
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December 27th – Little Women (2019), directed by Greta Gerwig
From Alison Willmore at Vulture:
“A century’s worth of artists have tried to leave their mark on Little Women. Louisa May Alcott’s novel has spawned Broadway productions and anime series, contemporary reimaginings and television musicals. It’s been the basis for no fewer than eight film adaptations, the latest of which comes from Greta Gerwig, who opted to have a new Little Women be the follow-up to her 2017 solo directorial debut Lady Bird. If, at the time, taking on such well-trodden material sounded like a staid choice for someone with the world at her feet, well, the film that she went on to make feels quite the opposite. It feels, exhilaratingly, like the throwing down of a gauntlet. Gerwig’s Little Women demands its viewers reconsider these familiar characters and what we’ve always assumed they stood for. It doesn’t just brim with life, it brims with ideas about happiness, economic realities, and what it means to push against or to hew to the expectations laid out for one’s gender.
The biggest choice Gerwig makes is to cut Alcott’s narrative into pieces and rearrange it by theme rather than chronology, using color grading to distinguish the past from the present. But her boldest, by far, has to do with how the film elevates Amy, the youngest and, traditionally, the least loved of the four March sisters. The rambunctious Jo, the iconoclast of the family, has always tended to be seen as the story’s driving force. But while Jo, played by Lady Bird lead Saoirse Ronan, is still central in this version, Amy, played by the marvelous Florence Pugh, is right alongside her. The journeys of the two characters, often at odds, get placed in counterpoint — their creative aspirations, their desire to see more of the world, and their respective clear-eyed assessments of the limitations put on them by society.
They are the ambitious siblings, Jo and Amy, but Little Women gives equal weight to the domestic goals of Meg (Emma Watson), and to the just developing ones of the shy Beth (Eliza Scanlen), as well as to the guidance of their kindhearted mother Marmee (Laura Dern) and haughty Aunt March (Meryl Streep). Alcott’s book may examine womanhood through the narrow spectrum of 19th-century New England gentility, but Gerwig treats the sisters’ diverging paths as a prism through which to look at larger themes of marriage, artistic validity, and financial constraints. While Jo is the character most willing to challenge norms, the film doesn’t endorse her path as the only one of value. ‘Just because my dreams are different from yours doesn’t mean they’re less important,’ Meg chides. But fulfilled dreams or not, Meg still sometimes chafes at the limitations of the life that she and her husband are able to afford. The Marches are rounded characters, not archetypes — even tragic Beth.”
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December 27th – 1917 (2019), directed by Sam Mendes
From Josh Martin at Film Inquiry:
“If Skyfall was Sam Mendes’ gritty, politically charged response to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, then 1917 is Mendes’ response to Nolan’s Dunkirk, even if they take place in completely different time periods. The two films are obviously aesthetically similar, filled with stark images that highlight the inhumanity of the whole gruesome experience (truth be told, I always forget that Nolan and Deakins have never worked together). But in a more significant fashion, 1917 and Dunkirk each represent a formal cinematic representation of an overarching philosophy of the experience of war. Dunkirk, with its reliance on competing temporal narratives and a focus on a particular kind of pulse-pounding montage, positions war as a disconnected journey, in which the duration of the experience can only be condensed into jarring, frightening fragments.
With its one-take gambit, 1917 positions war as continuous and unrelenting. Even when the characters are not in immediate danger, the camera never leaves their side, always tracking the lingering effects of violent chaos on the quiet moments of life. The smooth tracking shots are most effective when Schofield and Blake are in the trenches, swiftly ducking and moving around injured soldiers and other obstacles as they move with purpose to their destination … Whether the one-take approach is futile or brilliant, one thing is for certain: this is a technically stunning picture. Beyond the tracking shots, Deakins’ dazzling blend of shadows, working within the confines of a film with a muted color palette, is never less than sensational. Thomas Newman’s score — which contains a few much-appreciated shades of his work on Skyfall — is similarly terrific, working in a mode of low-key tension that veers into grandeur at different points. Perhaps most crucially, the film is never particularly violent, but always extraordinarily repulsive, highlighting the desolate brutality of World War I with unflinching clarity …
As a clever cinematic remix of the war film, 1917 is destined to be greeted by a good deal of hyperbole in the coming months. As always, it’s worth being wary of that. But even if it doesn’t quite rise to any kind of all-time masterpiece status, Mendes’ latest is a strong technical exercise that grows even more impressive when you consider just how moving it can be. Mendes and Deakins present a vision of uninterrupted chaos, equipped with a unique blend of personal pathos and visual bravado. Its cumulative impact is undeniable.”
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TBA – Farming (2018), directed by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
From Paul Byrnes at The Sydney Morning Herald:
“This modern British tale, Dickensian in its horror, stretches credibility to breaking point – until you realize it’s autobiographical. Then the truth sinks in: someone really did live through this … The gloom and bitterness make this film a challenge. Akinnouye-Agbaje spent about 14 years trying to get it made, so it is understandable he doesn’t want to leave anything out, but it might have helped if he had. His best work is in the home scenes, where Beckinsale makes Ingrid a complex character – loving and cuddling one minute, abusive and shrewish the next. She’s as hard and brittle as those tooth-breaking sweets they sell on English piers. ‘Don’ want none of my kids growin’ up soft’, she says at one point. Her mother (Ann Mitchell) tells her ‘not much chance of that’.
Akinnouye-Agbaje has a gift for characterisation. Even the skinheads are semi-rounded characters. The tone of the film is also unexpectedly lyrical – like a fairytale, albeit grimmer than Grimm. Unrelieved horror and violence can be enervating, but this film has the benefit of truth, and a message of survival. Whether that is enough to get you through it will be a personal matter. It’s a hard movie to forget.”
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TBA – Young Ahmed (2019), directed by Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
From Joel Mayward at Cinemayward:
“I am presently writing a PhD thesis on the intersection of theology, philosophy, and film via a close viewing and interpretation of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s post-secular cinema. Indeed, the Dardenne brothers are my primary motivation for attending Festival de Cannes this year, as their latest film Young Ahmed (Le Jeune Ahmed) is their most direct treatment and critique of religion, as well as the most conventional of their transcendent parables. Young Ahmed is certain to be the Dardenne brothers’ most divisive film in its empathetic-yet-opaque exploration of Islamic extremism via the radicalization of 13-year-old Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi), who plots to kill his teacher based on his interpretation of his local imam’s fundamentalist teachings. The film’s premise has already caused a bit of controversy on Twitter—before anyone had even seen the film, the brief plot synopsis raised questions about potential racism and cultural appropriation, calling for the Dardennes to be ‘cancelled’ in Twitter parlance. I’m of the opinion one should see a film before making (ironically) extremist interpretations about it—so I watched Young Ahmed twice while at Cannes. It’s rare for PhD candidates in theology to see their research topic trend on film Twitter; rarer still to have one’s theological research walk into the room as living artists.
Much of Young Ahmed is true to the Dardennes’ signature style: social realism in a Belgian context, handheld camerawork and long takes, non-professional or little-known actors, an ethically knotty premise and a cathartic dénouement. What differs here is the absence of some Dardennes regulars—this is the first time Belgian actor Olivier Gourmet has not been in a Dardennes film, and while Jérémie Renier was present in Cannes promoting Ira Sachs’ Frankie, he’s also nowhere to be seen in this film. The actor most familiar within the Dardennes’ oeuvre is Myriem Akheddiou, portraying Ahmed’s teacher-turned-victim, Inès, with verve and compassion. Ahmed attends Inès’ after school classes to get support with reading and math—she helped him overcome his dyslexia when he was younger—but has recently become quietly antagonistic towards her. He’s motivated and captivated by his local imam (Othmane Moumen), whose extremist views coincide with Ahmed’s deceased cousin, a jihadist terrorist. The imam declares Inès an apostate ‘bitch’ who is trying to destroy their religious faith. Yet Inès is also a faithful Muslim, and embodies the Islamic pillar of charity via her generous actions towards educating young people. The Twitter ‘cancelling’ of the Dardennes seems like a misunderstanding of Islam, conflating the religion with Middle Eastern people of color, and thus stereotyping both. Instead, the Dardennes offer a mosaic of the Islamic faith as various skin tones and national backgrounds come together in for a parent meeting about a new Arabic class Inès wants to teach the youth …
Interpretation is an essential term for appreciating the Dardennes’ films, particularly Young Ahmed. Their films are, paradoxically, powerfully affecting and sympathetic while remaining somewhat detached from characters’ interiority. We are never quite sure what Ahmed is thinking and feeling throughout the film; he often seems unsure as to his motives and reasoning, running forward into the future without a real plan beyond his newfound devotion to Allah. Addi portrays him as a typical middle-school-aged boy: inarticulate, awkward, sometimes harsh and violent while other times kindhearted and caring. He wears wiry glasses, a key metaphorical motif as the story progresses—it’s how he sees the world, and the lenses we use affect our interpretations.”
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