Justin Chang
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
In the many beautifully observed working-class dramedies he's made over the past five decades, the British writer and director, Mike Lee, has returned again and again to one simple yet endlessly resonant question. Why are some people happy while others are not? Why does Nicola, the sullen 20-something in Lee's 1990 film, Life is Sweet, seem incapable of even a moment's peace or pleasure?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
By contrast, how does Poppy, the upbeat heroine of Lee's 2008 comedy, Happy Go Lucky, manage to greet every misfortune with a smile? Lee's new movie, Hard Truths, could have been titled Unhappy Go Lucky. It follows a middle-aged North London misanthrope named Pansy, who's played in the single greatest performance I've seen this year by Marianne Jean-Baptiste.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
You might know Jean-Baptiste from Lee's wonderful 1996 film, Secrets and Lies, in which she played a shy, unassuming London optometrist seeking out her birth mother. But there's nothing unassuming about Pansy, who leads a life of seething, unrelenting misery. She spends most of her time indoors, barking orders and insults at her solemn husband, Kirtley, and their unemployed 22-year-old son, Moses.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Pansy keeps a spotless home, but the blank walls and sparse furnishings are noticeably devoid of warmth, cheer, or personality. When she isn't cleaning, she's trying to catch up on sleep, complaining about aches, pains, and exhaustion. Sometimes she goes out to shop or run errands, only to wind up picking fights with the people she meets. A dentist, a salesperson, a stranger in a parking lot.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Back at home, she unloads on Kirtley and Moses about all the indignities she's been subjected to and the general idiocy of the world around her.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
As you can hear from that virtuoso rant, Pansy has an insult comedian's ferocious wit and killer timing. While you wouldn't necessarily want to bump into her on the street, she makes for mesmerizing, even captivating on-screen company. Lee is often described as a Dickensian filmmaker, and for good reason. He's a committed realist with a gift for comic exaggeration.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Like nearly all Lee's films, Hard Truths emerged from a rigorous, months-long workshop process, in which the director worked closely with his actors to create their characters from scratch. As a result, Jean-Baptiste's performance, electrifying as it is, is also steeped in emotional complexity.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
The more time we spend with Pansy, the more we see that her rage against the world arises from deep loneliness and pain. Lee has little use for plot. He builds his stories from the details and detritus of everyday life, drifting from one character to the next.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Tawain Barrett is quietly heartbreaking as Pansy's son, Moses, who isolates himself and spends his time either playing video games or going on long neighborhood walks. Pansy's husband, Kirtley, is harder to parse. He's played by the terrific David Weber, with a passivity that's both sympathetic and infuriating.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
The most significant supporting character is Pansy's younger sister, Chantel, played by the luminous Michelle Austin, another Secrets and Lies alum. Chantal could scarcely be more different from her sister. She's a joyous, contented woman, with two adult daughters of her own. And she does everything she can to break through to Pansy.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
In the movie's most affecting scene, Chantel drags her sister to a cemetery to pay their respects to their mother, whose sudden death five years ago, we sense, is at the core of Pansy's unhappiness. At the same time, Lee doesn't fill in every blank. He's too honest a filmmaker to offer up easy explanations for why people feel the way they feel.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
His attitude toward Pansy, and toward all the prickly, outspoken, altogether marvelous characters he's given us, is best expressed in that graveside scene, when Chantel wraps her sister in a tight hug and tells her, with equal parts exasperation and affection, I don't understand you, but I love you.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
No Other Land isn't just the most powerful nonfiction film I saw in 2024. It also had one of the year's more remarkable off-screen narratives. the movie brings us into Masafir Yata, a community of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank, which is being bulldozed by the Israeli military to make room for a tank training ground.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Since it premiered early last year, the film has won numerous prizes at international festivals and from American critics' groups. Recently, it received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. For all its acclaim, though, no other land has yet to find an official U.S. distributor.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
That's both surprising and not surprising, given the industry's anxiety when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the directness with which this movie confronts it. Even so, no other land will be playing select theaters across the country, over the next month at least, and it deserves to be widely seen.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
It began shooting in 2019 and wrapped in October 2023, and so it feels in some ways like a pre-October 7th time capsule of the West Bank. It was directed by a team consisting of two Palestinian filmmakers, Basil Adra and Hamdan Balal, and two Israeli filmmakers, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Soar.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
During the production, Basel, an activist and journalist who grew up in Masafaryata, became good friends with Yuval, a Jerusalem-based journalist who was covering the demolitions. Their relationship provides the movie's dramatic core.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Part of the unexpected charm of No Other Land is that it sometimes plays like a verite buddy movie, as Basel and Yuval navigate the initial awkwardness of their cross-cultural friendship. Yuval pitches in with efforts to rebuild homes, taking some good-natured ribbing for not being the handiest of helpers.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
When Yuval complains that his articles about the conflict aren't getting enough clicks, Basel gently calls him out. You are enthusiastic, like you want to end the occupation in ten days, he says. This has been going on for decades. Nonetheless, Basel knows the importance of the role that journalism can play, and his and Yuval's combined efforts do succeed in drawing international media attention.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
You can hear their voices speaking out in this montage of English-language interviews from the film. Basel speaks partway through. We hear Yuval at the end of the clip.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
One of the major figures in No Other Land is Basel's father, Nasser, who has been arrested numerous times for protesting, an activist legacy that he has now passed on to his son. Basel feels ambivalent about inheriting that legacy and the exhaustion of having to spend your whole life fighting to protect your home.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
The footage shot by Basel and his colleagues nonetheless shows just how important that fight is. We see Palestinian families frantically evacuating mere minutes before their homes are destroyed, then moving their possessions into nearby caves. We see farm animals wandering in confusion from their demolished coops and pens, and children playing amid the ruins, as children in war zones often do.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Sometimes Basel is in front of the camera, marching in a protest or at one point screaming as he's dragged on the ground by IDF soldiers. Often he's behind the camera. He keeps filming even amid the chaos, including one gut-wrenching moment when a Palestinian man is shot at point-blank range by an Israeli settler. At one point, Basel says, this is a story about power.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
and we see how that power plays out in different ways. The filmmakers include footage from years earlier, when then-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the region. He spent just seven minutes touring Masafaryata, but that was enough to get Israel to call off demolitions in the area. There's also a power differential, of course, between Basel and Yuval.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
When No Other Land won two awards last February at the Berlin International Film Festival, the filmmakers took the stage together, and Yuval said in his acceptance speech, in two days we will go back to a land where we are not equal. And he added that this inequality has to end.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
How it could end is not a question that No Other Land can answer, but as an example of Palestinian-Israeli collaboration in action, Basel and Yuval and the vital movie they've made give us reason to hope.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
It's been 10 years since Barry Levinson directed a new feature. And if that seems like a long wait, I should note that it's taken 50 years for The Alto Knights, his new movie, to make it to the big screen. The idea was first pitched in the 1970s, not long after the New York City crime lord Frank Costello, known as the Prime Minister of the Underworld, died at the age of 82.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
But the film languished in development hell for decades, and only got the green light a few years ago, presumably on the strength of a major casting gimmick. Both Costello and his notorious friend-turned-rival Vito Genovese are played by the same actor, Robert De Niro. That's one way to liven up the formula, I suppose.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
De Niro has played many mobsters in The Godfather Part II, The Untouchables, Goodfellas, and The Irishman, for starters. He's riffing on a lot of those characters in The Alto Knights, which often plays like a hectic rehash of mob drama clichés. It's not entirely the movie's fault. The real-life events it's tackling here are why some of those clichés exist.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Frank Costello was the inspiration for the godfather himself, Don Vito Corleone. The Alto Knights begins with a bang in 1957. Frank, the big boss of the Luciano crime family, is shot in the lobby of his New York apartment building. Frank survives, and knows immediately that it was Vito Genovese who ordered the hit. But he keeps this a secret.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
He isn't interested in revenge, and he doesn't want to start a mob war. From there, the story flashes back about 50 years, recounting in rapid-fire fashion how young Frank and Vito befriended each other in New York, where they hung out at the Alto Knights Social Club, a hive of gangster activity. Both men became bootleggers during Prohibition, rising through the ranks of the Luciano family.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Vito became boss, but fled to Italy to avoid a murder rap. By the time Vito returned years later, after World War II, Frank was in charge of a prosperous criminal empire, protected by paid-off cops and politicians. Most of this backstory passes by in a barely coherent rush, which is a shame.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Given his knack for dramas about immigrant experiences and boyhood friendships, in films like Diner, Avalon, and Liberty Heights, Levinson could have teased out something rich from Frank and Vito's early years. But The Alto Knights, which was written by Goodfellas screenwriter Nicholas Pelleggi, is eager to race ahead to the tug of war between De Niro and De Niro.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Vito, who's violent and irrationally jealous, wants to seize back control of the outfit and turn it into a drug dealing operation. Frank is trying to cultivate a legitimate, respectable image and tries to talk Vito out of it.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
I'm not sure exactly what the movie gains from having one actor play both roles, unless it's trying to suggest that Frank and Vito are two sides of the same corrupt coin. Whatever the case, De Niro is clearly at home with this gangland material, and it's fun to watch him argue with himself.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
As Vito, De Niro seems to be channeling Joe Pesci's hothead from Goodfellas, barking and cursing under a layer of prosthetic pancake. As Frank, he smiles, shrugs, and plays it cool. Frank doesn't want any trouble. He just wants to rake in the dough, hobnob with philanthropists and politicians, and spend his nights at home watching TV with his wife, played by a frowny Deborah Messing.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
They have a loving, stable marriage, unlike Vito and his fiery wife, Anna, played by a very good Catherine Narducci. The Alto Knights doesn't have many more ideas than this good mobster, bad mobster dynamic.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
The script does pull together a lot of events from the 1950s, including a Senate investigation into interstate crimes and a historic summit that brought together hundreds of mob bosses from around the country. But the movie doesn't seem to trust its own story.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Barely a scene goes by that isn't embellished with popping flashbulbs and giant newspaper headlines, as if Levinson were trying to convince us that we were watching history in the making. Still, De Niro's performances do keep you watching. Or at least one of them does.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Vito may be little more than a walking tantrum, but Frank makes for good company, especially in those moments toward the end when he seriously considers bowing to Vito and stepping aside. So what if De Niro is playing a sentimentalized version of a ruthless crook?
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Hollywood gangster movies, even the ones as dubious and derivative as this one, have always known a thing or two about selling us a beautiful lie.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
It's a common complaint among moviegoers that the best new films aren't released until the last few months or even weeks of the year, so as to maximize their Oscar prospects. While that's not always the case, great movies are in fact released all year round, I do wish audiences hadn't had to wait until December to see Nickel Boys and The Brutalist.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
They're both ambitious period dramas, directed by two filmmakers of extraordinary talent and vision. Nickel Boys is simply one of the most thrillingly inventive literary adaptations I've seen in years. It's based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead about two black boys in 1960s Florida who were sent to a reform school called Nickel Academy.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Elwood, played by Ethan Harisi, is a studious teenager who lands in Nickel after unwittingly hitching a ride in a stolen car. At Nickel, he meets Turner, played by Brandon Wilson. The two forge a close friendship that sustains them through the tedium and the terror of life at Nickel.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Whitehead based his story on real-life events at Florida's Dozier School for Boys, which operated from 1900 to 2011, and where many students were found to have been abused, tortured, and in some cases murdered by staff.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Elwood, an idealist deeply inspired by the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., believes he can get out of nickel through legal channels, with some help from his loving grandmother, wonderfully played by ingenue Ellis Taylor. But the more cynical, streetwise Turner has his doubts. My grandmother got me that lawyer, man. Make a move there first.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
You could run. Nickel Boys is the first narrative feature written and directed by Rommel Ross, who previously made Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a lyrical documentary about black life in Alabama. Remarkably, Ross's filmmaking has lost none of its poetry here.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
He and his cinematographer, Joe Mofray, have boldly decided to tell the story in the visual equivalent of first person, so that at any given moment, you're seeing the world through the eyes of either Elwood or Turner. The approach takes some getting used to, but the effect is astonishing.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
It calls on us to empathize in a radical new way with these two young men, their fleeting hopes and their crushing sense of entrapment. By toggling between Elwood's and Turner's perspectives and showing us how much they depend on each other, the movie makes us feel as if their souls are truly connected, an achievement that becomes all the more heartbreaking as the film goes on.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
The Brutalist is no less beautifully shot than Nickel Boys, but it's told in a more straightforward, classically sweeping fashion. Adrian Brody, in his best performance since he won an Oscar for The Pianist, stars as Laszlo Toth, a Holocaust survivor who arrives in New York in 1947.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Back in his native Hungary, before the war, Laszlo was an architect, famed for designing austere, unadorned buildings. In the U.S., he winds up in Pennsylvania. He's a nobody, shoveling coal and struggling with a heroin addiction. But then Laszlo finds an unlikely benefactor in Harrison Lee Van Buren, a self-made titan of industry who lives in Doylestown, just north of Philadelphia.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
He's plagued magnificently by Guy Pearce. Harrison learns of Laszlo's European reputation and and hires him to design a local community center, a years-long project that will become an expensive, all-consuming obsession. In time, Laszlo is reunited with his wife, Erzsabet, a very good Felicity Jones, from whom he was separated during the war.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
But her return can only do so much to ground him, as he succumbs to the pull of ambition and addiction. The Brutalist is clearly in conversation with the Fountainhead, Like Ayn Rand's architect protagonist, Howard Rourke, Laszlo is a stubborn, uncompromising visionary.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
But the actor-turned-filmmaker Brady Corbett, who previously directed the corrosive pop star psychodrama Vox Lux, is chasing after some thorny ideas of his own. The Brutalist is about the challenges of cultural assimilation, the crucial role that immigrant labor played in America's post-war boom, and the inherent power imbalance between patrons and artists. It's also about anti-Semitism.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Laszlo is tolerated, barely, within Harrison's waspy inner circle. His genius makes him interesting and valuable to them, but it also makes him exploitable. Not everything about The Brutalist works. One late plot twist seems a touch literal-minded, and I'm still chewing over the meaning of the final act.
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Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
But Courbet, who's only 36, is already a director of startling confidence, and he's made a rare American film that feels genuinely worthy of the word epic. Here I should note that The Brutalist runs 3 hours and 35 minutes, and holds you for every one of them. There is a 15-minute intermission, and I couldn't wait for it to end.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
In the many beautifully observed working-class dramedies he's made over the past five decades, the British writer and director Mike Lee has returned again and again to one simple yet endlessly resonant question. Why are some people happy while others are not? Why does Nicola, the sullen 20-something in Lee's 1990 film Life is Sweet, seem incapable of even a moment's peace or pleasure?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
By contrast, how does Poppy, the upbeat heroine of Lee's 2008 comedy, Happy Go Lucky, manage to greet every misfortune with a smile? Lee's new movie, Hard Truths, could have been titled Unhappy Go Lucky. It follows a middle-aged North London misanthrope named Pansy, who's played in the single greatest performance I've seen this year by Marianne Jean-Baptiste.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
You might know Jean-Baptiste from Lee's wonderful 1996 film, Secrets and Lies, in which she played a shy, unassuming London optometrist seeking out her birth mother. But there's nothing unassuming about Pansy, who leads a life of seething, unrelenting misery. She spends most of her time indoors, barking orders and insults at her solemn husband, Kirtley, and their unemployed 22-year-old son, Moses.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Pansy keeps a spotless home, but the blank walls and sparse furnishings are noticeably devoid of warmth, cheer, or personality. When she isn't cleaning, she's trying to catch up on sleep, complaining about aches, pains, and exhaustion. Sometimes she goes out to shop or run errands, only to wind up picking fights with the people she meets. A dentist, a salesperson, a stranger in a parking lot.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Back at home, she unloads on Kirtley and Moses about all the indignities she's been subjected to and the general idiocy of the world around her.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
As you can hear from that virtuoso rant, Pansy has an insult comedian's ferocious wit and killer timing. While you wouldn't necessarily want to bump into her on the street, she makes for mesmerizing, even captivating on-screen company. Lee is often described as a Dickensian filmmaker, and for good reason. He's a committed realist with a gift for comic exaggeration.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Like nearly all Lee's films, hard truths emerge from a rigorous, months-long workshop process, in which the director worked closely with his actors to create their characters from scratch. As a result, Jean-Baptiste's performance, electrifying as it is, is also steeped in emotional complexity.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
The more time we spend with Pansy, the more we see that her rage against the world arises from deep loneliness and pain. Lee has little use for plot. He builds his stories from the details and detritus of everyday life, drifting from one character to the next.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Tawain Barrett is quietly heartbreaking as Pansy's son, Moses, who isolates himself and spends his time either playing video games or going on long neighborhood walks. Pansy's husband, Kirtley, is harder to parse. He's played by the terrific David Weber, with a passivity that's both sympathetic and infuriating.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
The most significant supporting character is Pansy's younger sister, Chantel, played by the luminous Michelle Austin, another Secrets and Lies alum. Chantel could scarcely be more different from her sister. She's a joyous, contented woman with two adult daughters of her own, and she does everything she can to break through to Pansy.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
In the movie's most affecting scene, Chantel drags her sister to a cemetery to pay their respects to their mother, whose sudden death five years ago, we sense, is at the core of Pansy's unhappiness. At the same time, Lee doesn't fill in every blank. He's too honest a filmmaker to offer up easy explanations for why people feel the way they feel.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
His attitude toward Pansy, and toward all the prickly, outspoken, altogether marvelous characters he's given us, is best expressed in that graveside scene, when Chantel wraps her sister in a tight hug and tells her, with equal parts exasperation and affection... I don't understand you, but I love you.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
It feels like only yesterday that I was recommending a new movie from the director Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter David Koepp. Actually, it was about two months ago. The movie was Presence, a ghost story made with the thrift and ingenuity that Soderbergh has long been known for. He and Kep have become ideal creative partners.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
They're both prolific Hollywood veterans in their early 60s who know genre conventions inside out. and who continue to play with those conventions in smart, stylish ways. Compared with Presence and their earlier thriller, Kimmy, Soderbergh and Kep's latest outing, Black Bag, is certainly a slicker, bigger-budget affair.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
But it still has a breezy, light-fingered intelligence that feels consistent with their M.O., Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender star as Catherine and George, two brilliant, high-ranking operatives for Britain's National Cyber Security Centre, or NCSC. They're also a long-time married couple.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Not an easy feat in a profession where monogamous commitment, especially between two agents, is virtually unheard of. it's fair to ask how much Catherine and George can really trust each other, given the insane levels of duplicity and compartmentalization their jobs require.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
The title, Black Bag, is basically shorthand for classified intel, something Catherine and George say when they're going somewhere or doing something that they can't disclose. The plot is set in motion by one of those signature movie MacGuffins. A deadly cyberweapon called Severus has fallen into the wrong hands.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
NCSC suspects one of its own, and so it enlists George, a master at sussing out lies, to figure out who. George tells Catherine that they'll be hosting a dinner party for four of their colleagues, one of whom is the mole. What he doesn't tell Catherine is that she herself is a suspect.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
With any luck. The four dinner guests are a compelling group, in part because they, too, are romantically paired off, which makes the whole evening play a bit like a John le Carre rewrite of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Tom Burke plays Freddy, a longtime agent whose reputation for drinking and philandering makes him a volatile match for Clarissa, a smart young data expert played by Marisa Abella. Regé-Jean Page, of Bridgerton fame, plays an ambitious young agent named James, who's in a similarly stormy relationship with Dr. Zoe Vaughn, the agency's psychiatrist.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
She's in the mildly kinky position of knowing everyone's intimate secrets, some of them, anyway. Zoe is played by Naomi Harris, who was Moneypenny in the last three James Bond movies. That's not the only 007 tie-in. Look out for Pierce Brosnan in a key supporting role as a glowering agency head. Black Bag has its share of Bond-style globetrotting intrigue.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
There's a mysterious murder, a brief car explosion, and a nail-biter of a secret mission to Zurich. But at heart, it isn't really an action movie. It's a marital dramedy masquerading as an espionage thriller. Or maybe it's the other way around. Either way, it's a witty, sexy riff on themes of loyalty and betrayal, in relationships as well as on the geopolitical stage.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
The story unfolds as a series of teasingly intimate one-on-one conversations, in which secrets, lies, red herrings, and revelations are dished out. It's been a while since I've seen an ensemble of actors this deliciously in sync. There's an almost promiscuous energy to the way the story keeps pairing the characters off, in new and surprising configurations.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Fassbender and Abella have a few chaste but scintillating scenes together. and there's an extraordinary sequence in which Catherine goes in for a therapy session with Zoe, a battle of wits for which both Blanchett and Harris are exceedingly well equipped. In the end, though, it's Catherine and George who hold our attention the most.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
They've been told that their marriage is their one major weakness, as it risks compromising them both. And Blanchett and Fassbender, without so much as a hint of histrionics, convey that even amid all the fun and games, something real is very much at stake. I don't think it gives away too much to say that Black Bag is ultimately an ode to a happy marriage.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
I'm talking about George and Catherine, of course. But after three terrific movies in a row, I'm also talking a little about Soderbergh and Kep.
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
The 80-year-old Charles Burnett is often thought of as one of American cinema's last true independents. His movies, most of which focus on working-class black families in his home city of Los Angeles, have been underseen, underexposed, and sometimes misunderstood. In the past couple of decades, he's been rightly recognized as one of the greats.
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
His 1978 first feature, Killer of Sheep, was released in theaters in 2007 and widely hailed as a masterpiece. Burnett himself received an honorary Oscar in 2017. Critics have played their part in Burnett's rediscovery, though some have been blamed for burying his work in the first place.
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
His 1983 feature My Brother's Wedding was never properly released, for reasons often attributed to a mixed review in the New York Times. And this week brings the overdue arrival of Burnett's 1999 comedy, The Annihilation of Fish, which, because of a pan from Variety, as the story goes, never landed an American distributor.
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
that we can see it now, nearly 26 years later, is due to the remarkable efforts of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Film Foundation, and Milestone Films, which worked together to restore the movie. It's now getting a limited theatrical release.
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
There are a lot of reasons to seek out The Annihilation of Fish, especially since it's a rare chance to see three late, great actors on screen together, Lynn Redgrave, Margot Kidder, and James Earl Jones, who died just last year at the age of 93. Here, a 60-something Jones plays a Jamaican-American man who goes by the name Fish, and who's just been released from a 10-year stay in an L.A.
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
mental institution. Fish isn't a danger to anyone. He's honest and unfailingly polite. Every so often, though, he gets into an aggressive wrestling match with a demon that only he apparently can see. Around the same time, we meet Redgrave's character, a San Francisco woman named Poinsettia, who, like Fish, has an active fantasy life. She believes she's being romanced by Puccini,
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Imagine if Miss Havisham from Great Expectations were an opera buff, and you're halfway there. Through a strange turn of events, Poinsettia moves to L.A. and rents an apartment in a boarding house just across the hall from Fish. The house otherwise appears to be empty, except for their watchful landlady, Mrs. Muldroon, played by a lovely Margot Kidder.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
One night, Fish finds Poinsettia passed out drunk outside his door, and brings her inside his apartment so she can sleep it off. From this odd encounter is born an equally odd friendship. Despite some initial wariness, they soon take a liking to each other and spend their days together playing cards. While Puccini's ghost is pretty much history at this point, Fish's demon is still very active.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
During one of their wrestling bouts, Fish asks Poinsettia to referee, even though she, of course, can't see the demon herself. Close your eyes.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Let's get down to business. Fruitcake. All right.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
While he clearly isn't afraid of broad comedy, Burnett has no use for strained quirkiness. He doesn't deploy his characters as cheap comic relief, or treat their strangeness as a problem to be solved. He finds the loopy logic even in their most illogical behavior. I think he wants us to look at Fish and Poinsettia pretty much the same way the landlady, Mrs. Muldroon, does—
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Although a touch stern at first, she comes to accept and even appreciate them in all their eccentricities. Whatever may ail Fish and Poinsettia, friendship and love appear to be the only medicine they need. Fish cooks Poinsettia Jamaican food, she takes him to the park, and in time their bond turns romantic.
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
At one point Fish worries that the two of them have nothing in common, to which Poinsettia replies, "'Old is what we have in common.'" It's one of many lines I laughed at in The Annihilation of Fish, which doesn't shy away from the realities of aging or the fitful complications of an interracial romance. But it doesn't inflate those things into obstacles, either.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
What finally makes Fish and Poinsettia seem like an ideal match is simply the chemistry between the actors themselves, the way Jones' gravitas tempers Redgrave's intensity, and the way her wild energy brings out his own.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Burnett has made a simple yet beguiling film about how two imperfect people can find a kind of perfection in each other's company, and how sometimes in life, and in the movies, good things do come to those who wait.