Justin Chang
Appearances
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
It's often said that December for film critics is like tax season for accountants. This is our crunch time, when we try to take stock of the past 12 months' worth of movies and determine our favorites. Good luck getting us to agree on anything.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Earlier this month, the New York Film Critics Circle gave its Best Picture award to The Brutalist, Brady Corbett's sweeping post-war drama about a Hungarian-Jewish architect's American rebirth. A few days later, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, of which I'm a member, gave its top prize to Anora, Sean Baker's madly entertaining farce about a Brooklyn sex worker.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
It says something about the quality of the movies this year that as much as I like Anora and The Brutalist, both titles landed just outside my own personal list of favorites. Here, then, are the ten, no, eleven, best movies of 2024.
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David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
My number one movie of the year is Close Your Eyes, the latest from the legendary Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice, who's best known for his 1973 classic, The Spirit of the Beehive.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Close Your Eyes is the first feature he's directed in roughly three decades, and it's an intensely personal work about a long-retired filmmaker trying to solve the mystery of what happened to an old friend who vanished years earlier.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
What begins as a kind of cinephile detective story gradually morphs into an emotionally transcendent drama about the power of love, the agony of loss, and the pleasures of getting lost in the movies. The next two movies on my list are both indictments of corporate greed, with faintly apocalyptic vibes.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is a bracingly foul-mouthed comedy from the Romanian director Radu Giuda about an underpaid production assistant driving from one thankless gig to the next. Evil Does Not Exist is Rusuke Hamaguchi's haunting follow-up to his Oscar-winning Drive My Car.
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David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
It's set in a remote Japanese village that comes under environmental threat from the construction of a glamping site. Up next are the two most daring and inventive American movies I saw all year.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
One of them is A Different Man, Aaron Schimberg's audacious and assured horror comedy, starring Sebastian Stan as a man whose face is covered with tumors due to a genetic condition called neurofibromatosis. he experiences a miraculous recovery, which is when his nightmare really begins.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
The other terrific American movie on my list is Nickel Boys, Rommel Ross's stunning adaptation of Colson Whitehead's novel about two black boys living in horrific conditions at a reform school in the Jim Crow South. In this scene, one boy's grandmother, beautifully played by Anjanue Ellis-Taylor, is heartbroken at not being allowed to see him.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
She expresses her sadness to one of his friends and asks him to please give her grandson a package of letters.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
My next two favorite movies put an enchanting modern spin on ancient myths. In La Chimera, the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher riffs on the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. As a tomb raider in the Tuscan countryside, Josh O'Connor has never been better. The other one is Music, a brilliant rethink of Oedipus Rex from the German director Angela Schoneleck.
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David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Her storytelling is enigmatic to the point of baffling, but it's also moving beyond words. Next on my list is No Other Land, a searing documentary from a collective of four filmmakers, two Palestinian and two Israeli, who chronicled the demolition of homes in the occupied West Bank. It has yet to find a U.S. distributor, despite having won numerous prizes at festivals and from critics groups.
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David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
No other land would make a harrowing double bill with my next movie, Green Border, a ripped-from-the-headlines drama that embroils us in the chaos at the Polish-Belarusian border. The veteran Polish director, Agnieszka Holland, has spent much of her long career depicting the plight of refugees in wartime. Green Border is one of her very best.
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David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
The last two movies on my list illuminate the lives of their women characters with rigorous realism. All We Imagine as Light is a quietly shimmering drama about three Mumbai women who find solidarity in the face of societal repression. It confirms the Indian director Payal Kapadia as a remarkable new talent.
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David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
And last on my list is Hard Truths, in which the great English director Mike Lee reunites with the actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste almost 30 years after they worked together on Secrets and Lies. All I'll say about it is that Jean-Baptiste gives the greatest performance I've seen in ages, and it will be watched and remembered long after this year is over.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
During the pandemic, the Chinese director Jia Zhengke, like many of us, had a lot of time on his hands. He began sifting through a personal archive consisting of footage that he had shot since 2001. He ended up weaving much of this footage, some of which we've seen before, into a gorgeous and lyrical feature called Caught by the Tides.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
We're used to seeing archival material in documentaries, but this film is something far rarer and stranger. It's an archival drama, an entire narrative composed from two decades' worth of discarded scraps.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
The movie uses this unfamiliar method to tell a familiar Zhao story about a passionate and tough-minded woman played by the great Zhao Tao, the director's frequent collaborator and off-screen wife. Over several years, this character, whose name is Chao Chao, experiences romance and heartbreak, and winds up adrift, traveling a 21st century Chinese landscape that is forever in flux.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
This flux has become the great subject of Jia's career. He's deeply attuned to the winds of social, economic, political, technological, and even geographical change sweeping through his country. Caught by the Tides unfolds in three acts. The first takes place in Datong, a city in northern China.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Jia's fans will recognize scenes from Unknown Pleasures, his 2002 drama about aimless youth in a town where the local coal mining industry is on the decline and capitalism is on the rise. Chow Chow is a young dancer who entertains in bars and clubs, and also at promotional events for a liquor brand.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Every time she dances, Jia unleashes a torrent of music, most infectiously with the 1998 hit Butterfly by the Swedish pop group Smile DK. Chao has always used music vividly in his films, and in Caught by the Tides, he strings together so many free-form scenes of people singing and dancing that the movie almost plays like a full-blown musical. It's ragged and disorienting, but that's the point.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
The future, and even the present, seem almost bursting with possibility. It's around this time that Chao Chao falls in love with a local gangster named Bin, played by the actor Li Jubin. but their romance swiftly goes sour, and the two separate, which sets the stage for the movie's more melancholy second act. Chiao Chiao heads south, sailing down the Yangtze River and searching for Bean.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
He resurfaces at one point, but what they once had is now lost forever. Meanwhile, we witness the staggering human toll of the Three Gorges Dam project, which has led to mass displacement and demolition of homes in the region. Jha has an uncanny ability to capture the big picture along with the small, to move from an intimate, character-focused drama to a more expansive, panoramic one.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
With each shift in perspective, we're reminded that every person uprooted here has a story to tell. Much of the second act footage comes from Jha's 2008 film, Still Life, and his 2019 drama, Ash's Purest White. More than a decade separates those two movies, and Jia doesn't bother to hide the seams as he toggles between them.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
One of the most captivating things about Caught by the Tides is that the images and formats change over time, from grainy film stock and low-grade digital video early on to smoother HD video and even some virtual reality footage in the later sections. Jia has showed us before how China and the larger world are being transformed.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Here, he shows us that the motion picture medium itself is continually evolving. In the third act, Chow Chow briefly reunites in Datong with Bean, who's now visibly aged. This section was shot in 2022, under tight COVID protocols, and Jia uses it to capture a mood of present-day alienation. He shows us influencers shooting their TikToks and friendly robots roaming the aisles of grocery stores.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
But Jia never loses sight of our heroine or the extraordinary actor playing her. Through the entire film, Zhao Tao never says a word, a bold choice that perhaps made it easier for the director to shape a narrative out of the raw material. Zhao doesn't need the dialogue. She has the radiance and emotional eloquence of a silent film star.
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Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
By the close of Caught by the Tides, Chow Chow isn't dancing anymore. She's jogging at night with several other women and men. The scene plays like a tribute from Jia Zhangke to his fellow Chinese citizens, a deeply moving culmination of all that they've endured that holds out hope as they run bravely into the future.
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
When The Shrouds premiered at film festivals last year, David Cronenberg described it as his most personal work. a deeply felt response to the death of his longtime wife from cancer in 2017. The movie is about a man named Karsh, who lost his wife, Rebecca, to cancer four years earlier. That's not the only similarity.
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Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
If you know what Cronenberg looks like, you'll see that Karsh, played by Vincent Cassel with a silvery shock of hair, resembles the director. Maybe not a dead ringer, but close enough to give you a chill and a bit of a chuckle. That's the thing about the shrouds. It's deeply morbid and sad, but it's also disarmingly funny.
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Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
Karsh is the mastermind behind a company called GraveTech, which allows people to monitor the remains of their dead loved ones. Before the body is buried, it's wrapped in a high-tech metal shroud equipped with an MRI-style scanner. And so at any time, with a swipe of your phone, you can watch a feed from the grave of the decomposing body. It's not just on your phone, either.
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Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
The feed also goes to a screen built into the person's headstone. Karsh himself uses grave tech obsessively, keeping close tabs on his wife Becca's body at all times. This has naturally made it difficult for him to move on. One amusing early scene finds Karsh on a blind date with a woman who heads for the exit the minute she finds out what he does for a living.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
The next day, Karsh is debriefing the date with Becca's sister, Terry, played by Diane Kruger.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
I have my own body. Cronenberg is often described as a master of body horror, a subgenre he helped pioneer with early efforts like The Brood and Scanners, and recently pushed to audacious new extremes with the wondrously icky Crimes of the Future. The label can be misleading, though. Cronenberg's films are even more cerebral than they are visceral.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
And he's never been purely interested in grotesque for grotesque's sake. The Shrouds is certainly a body horror movie in perhaps the most relatable sense. It's about the physical ravages of illness and death. At various points, Karsh sees Becca, also played by Diane Kruger, in dreamlike flashbacks that reveal exactly what the cancer did to her body.
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Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
I can't think of a filmmaker besides Cronenberg who could present the body this way, with clinical directness, undimmed desire, and real tenderness. Early on in the film, someone vandalizes the Grave Tech Cemetery, ripping the headstones from their foundations and hacking into the video feeds, for reasons unknown. The Shrouds isn't just a horror movie about corporeal decay.
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Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
It's a thriller steeped in techno-paranoia. To get to the bottom of the vandalism, Karsh enlists the help of Terry's ex-husband, a computer whiz played by an unnervingly twitchy Guy Pearce. Karsh also relies on an AI personal assistant, voiced by, you guessed it, Kruger again, who doesn't seem entirely trustworthy.
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Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
There are whispers that the vandals are aligned with shadowy Russian and or Chinese forces, hinting at a mass data theft conspiracy that may or may not exist. The Shrouds never fully coheres as a mystery. In the end, it's an intriguing but not especially satisfying puzzle. I didn't mind that about it. Cronenberg isn't out to provide easy answers.
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Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
He's saying that we live in such a 24-7 internet fog now, who knows what could be out there, mining the most human and vulnerable parts of ourselves, our habits, our yearnings, our relationships. This isn't a new theme for Cronenberg. He's always been fascinated by the way technology alters our minds and even our bodies.
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Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
In his 1983 classic Videodrome, the director inserted a Betamax cassette into his protagonist's torso, literalizing the idea of what TV is doing to us. The Shrouds isn't nearly as graphic, but it doesn't have to be. It's set in a world where most of us have all but fused with our phones already. All of which is to say that this seemingly death-obsessed movie...
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Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
about grief and desire and the unsettling power of technology to assuage them, is also a movie about life and the way more than a few of us live now.
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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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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
It's become customary to describe a new Wes Anderson movie as more of the same. But it says something about the sheer richness of his visual imagination that he can make two movies set in roughly the same era that look and feel nothing alike. His previous film, Asteroid City, was a gorgeous, warmly nostalgic ode to the American Southwest of the 1950s. His new movie, The Phoenician Scheme...
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
takes place in the same decade, but it's a chillier, more globetrotting affair. It follows an obscenely wealthy businessman named Anatole Zsa Zsa Korda, played by an excellent Benicio del Toro. Korda is the latest of Anderson's dashing scoundrels, the titan of industry as international man of mystery.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
He travels the world in private jets, making money, deals, and enemies at every turn, and destabilizing governments and exploiting local workers along the way. Now Korda wants to establish a lasting legacy. He plans to develop a massive infrastructure project in a place called Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia. To pull this off, Korda decides to reconcile with his estranged daughter Liesel.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
She's the oldest of his ten children. and make her his heir and partner. Liesel, played by a terrific Mia Threpleton, isn't sure she wants any part of it. Dumped in a convent when she was five, she's now a novitiate, and she scorns her father's dishonest business practices. Also, there's a rumor going around that, years ago, Korda killed Liesel's mother.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Murderer or not, Corda fits snugly into Anderson's ever-expanding gallery of bad dads, from Royal Tenenbaum to Steve Zissou. The Phoenician scheme is a reconciliation story, and so Liesel reluctantly goes along with Corda's harebrained plan, hoping she can do some good along the way. but it won't be easy.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
In this scene, aboard Corda's jet, Liesel gets some insight into her father and his grandiose view of himself. We're starting our descent.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
I don't need my human rights. Much of the busy, preposterous plot follows Corda as he tries to get various business associates and family members to help finance his scheme. Anderson, who wrote the script with Roman Coppola, keeps updating us on how much each character has invested. At times, the Phoenician scheme feels perilously close to math homework.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
It's not too hard to follow, though, especially compared with the more densely layered Asteroid City. The infrastructure deal is basically an excuse for the director to squeeze in as many of his favorite actors as possible. Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston play a pair of basketball-loving businessmen. Mathieu Amalric turns up as a nightclub owner, Jeffrey Wright as a sea captain.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And there are other Anderson alums in the mix, too, like Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Richard Ayoade, and Hope Davis. The first-timers, though, make the strongest impressions. Riz Ahmed plays an endearing Phoenician prince, and Michael Cera is delightful as a nerdy Norwegian entomologist named Bjorn. The most moving performance comes from Threpleton.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Her Liesel has the radiant self-possession of the French icon Anna Karina, who gave one of the all-time great nun performances in Jacques Rivette's 1966 classic La Religieuse. Although Anderson's films are often suffused with themes of spirituality, morality, and grace, he seldom engages the subject of religion as directly as he does here.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
In a way, the father-daughter relationship is a metaphor for God and money, in which Corda's endless pursuit of riches keeps bumping up against Liesel's strong sense of faith and social justice. The Phoenician scheme may present itself as a fabulous piece of stylized escapism, but it's hard to watch it and not think about the oligarchs of today.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Anderson's style is often described as whimsical, but here he's made a movie about the literal whims of tycoons. The film has its signature visual touches, full of symmetrical compositions and exquisite textures and details. But there's an uninviting coldness to the backdrops themselves. A rich man's fortress, a half-built railway tunnel, a fancy but dim nightclub.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
It's as if we're seeing the hollowness of extreme wealth. In some ways, this is one of Anderson's darker, angrier, more violent films. One of the first things we see is a man being blown in half by a bomb intended for Korda, who's the target of multiple assassination attempts. Whenever he's in danger, Korda says, Which is hardly reassuring to those around him.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
The Phoenician scheme is well aware that men like Korda make life worse for everyone else, which is why I'm still puzzling over the movie's happy ending, which at the last minute engineers a fateful change of heart. The conclusion Anderson leaves us with could be read either hopefully or cynically, for the Zsa Zsa Kordas of the world to do the right thing might well require an act of God.
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Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
When The Shrouds premiered at film festivals last year, David Cronenberg described it as his most personal work. a deeply felt response to the death of his longtime wife from cancer in 2017. The movie is about a man named Karsh, who lost his wife, Rebecca, to cancer four years earlier. That's not the only similarity.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
If you know what Cronenberg looks like, you'll see that Karsh, played by Vincent Cassell with a silvery shock of hair, resembles the director. Maybe not a dead ringer, but close enough to give you a chill and a bit of a chuckle. That's the thing about the shrouds. It's deeply morbid and sad, but it's also disarmingly funny.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Karsh is the mastermind behind a company called Gravetech, which allows people to monitor the remains of their dead loved ones. Before the body is buried, it's wrapped in a high-tech metal shroud equipped with an MRI-style scanner. And so at any time, with a swipe of your phone, you can watch a feed from the grave of the decomposing body. It's not just on your phone, either.
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Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
The feed also goes to a screen built into the person's headstone. Karsh himself uses grave tech obsessively, keeping close tabs on his wife Becca's body at all times. This has naturally made it difficult for him to move on. One amusing early scene finds Karsh on a blind date with a woman who heads for the exit the minute she finds out what he does for a living.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
The next day, Karsh is debriefing the date with Becca's sister, Terry, played by Diane Kruger.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
I have my own body. Cronenberg is often described as a master of body horror, a subgenre he helped pioneer with early efforts like The Brood and Scanners, and recently pushed to audacious new extremes with the wondrously icky Crimes of the Future. The label can be misleading, though. Cronenberg's films are even more cerebral than they are visceral.
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Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
And he's never been purely interested in grotesque for grotesque's sake. The Shrouds is certainly a body horror movie in perhaps the most relatable sense. It's about the physical ravages of illness and death. At various points, Karsh sees Becca, also played by Diane Kruger, in dreamlike flashbacks that reveal exactly what the cancer did to her body.
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Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
I can't think of a filmmaker besides Cronenberg who could present the body this way, with clinical directness, undimmed desire, and real tenderness. Early on in the film, someone vandalizes the Grave Tech Cemetery, ripping the headstones from their foundations and hacking into the video feeds, for reasons unknown. The Shrouds isn't just a horror movie about corporeal decay.
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Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
It's a thriller steeped in techno-paranoia. To get to the bottom of the vandalism, Karsh enlists the help of Terry's ex-husband, a computer whiz played by an unnervingly twitchy Guy Pearce. Karsh also relies on an AI personal assistant, voiced by, you guessed it, Kruger again, who doesn't seem entirely trustworthy.
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Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
There are whispers that the vandals are aligned with shadowy Russian and or Chinese forces, hinting at a mass data theft conspiracy that may or may not exist. The Shrouds never fully coheres as a mystery. In the end, it's an intriguing but not especially satisfying puzzle. I didn't mind that about it. Cronenberg isn't out to provide easy answers.
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Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
He's saying that we live in such a 24-7 internet fog now, who knows what could be out there, mining the most human and vulnerable parts of ourselves, our habits, our yearnings, our relationships. This isn't a new theme for Cronenberg. He's always been fascinated by the way technology alters our minds and even our bodies.
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Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
In his 1983 classic Videodrome, the director inserted a Betamax cassette into his protagonist's torso, literalizing the idea of what TV is doing to us. The Shrouds isn't nearly as graphic, but it doesn't have to be. It's set in a world where most of us have all but fused with our phones already. All of which is to say that this seemingly death-obsessed movie...
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Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
about grief and desire and the unsettling power of technology to assuage them, is also a movie about life and the way more than a few of us live now.
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Remembering David Lynch
The Haunted House thriller Presence has a formal conceit so clever, I'm surprised it hasn't ever been done or attempted before. Maybe another movie has done it that I'm not aware of. This is a ghost story told entirely from the ghost's point of view. We see what the ghost sees. The ghost cannot leave the house, and so the movie never leaves the house either.
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Remembering David Lynch
You could say that the ghost is played by the director, Steven Soderbergh, who serves as his own cinematographer, as usual. working under the pseudonym of Peter Andrews. That's Soderbergh holding the camera as it glides up and down the stairs, following the characters from room to room, and hovering over them as they try to figure out what's going on.
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Remembering David Lynch
As the movie opens, Rebecca and Chris, played by Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan, are about to move into a handsome, craftsman-style house with their two teenage children. The family dynamics are tense, and a little on the nose. Rebecca, a high-strung type who works in finance, clearly favors their popular, jockish son, Tyler.
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Remembering David Lynch
Chris is the mellower spouse and parent, and he has a close bond with their daughter, Chloe, who's quieter and more withdrawn. Even as we get to know this foursome, though, the movie's most interesting and enigmatic character is the silent Spectre behind the camera. You keep asking yourself, who is this ghost, and what does it want? Is it the spirit of the house's previous owner?
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Remembering David Lynch
Or is it someone else entirely who has some unspoken connection with the family? Before long, paranormal things start to happen. The ghost begins manifesting itself in physical ways, making the lights flicker and the walls rattle, or knocking a cup of juice to the floor. Initially, only Chloe, played by Kalina Liang, seems to notice these strange phenomena.
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Remembering David Lynch
and she tries in vain to tell her parents and Tyler about what's happening. No, I haven't felt or sensed anything unusual here.
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Remembering David Lynch
Tyler, played by Eddie Madej, is a bit of a hothead. He has little patience with his sister's anxieties, which, we soon learn, are tied to a recent tragedy involving one of her best friends. Presence isn't just an unsettling ghost story.
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Remembering David Lynch
It's one of the more incisive recent movies I've seen about the inner lives of teenagers, whether it's their feelings of loneliness and disaffection, or their vulnerability to high school gossip, and worse. Eventually, Chloe begins dating Ryan, a friend of Tyler's, and there's a voyeuristic queasiness to the way the camera, which is to say the ghost, eavesdrops on their moments of intimacy.
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Remembering David Lynch
There's nothing prurient about these moments. On the contrary, what you feel is the ghost's enormous concern for Chloe. Soderbergh's camera movements are so delicate and expressive, he can convey empathy with a mere twitch or shudder, or rage with a sudden, violent lurch. Before long, we realize that the ghost isn't trying to scare this family. It's trying to warn them.
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Remembering David Lynch
no American director is churning out independent movies as deftly and resourcefully as Steven Soderbergh. This is his latest collaboration with the veteran screenwriter David Koepp, whom he last worked with on the home invasion thriller Kimmy, which ingeniously reinvented Hitchcock's rear window for the age of Alexa and COVID.
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Remembering David Lynch
Like Kimmy, but in a completely different way, Presence makes brilliant use of spatial confinement and extracts maximal tension from a minimalist premise. As ever, Soderbergh seems to have approached this material as a technical challenge, a problem to be solved. How do you make a movie entirely from a ghost's POV?
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Remembering David Lynch
Soderbergh is mentioned in interviews that he wore martial arts slippers so as to muffle his footsteps as he chased his actors around the house with his camera. I'm not usually big on behind-the-scenes documentaries, but Presence is one movie I'd make an exception for. But while Soderbergh may be flexing his technique, Presence never feels like a mere exercise.
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Remembering David Lynch
That's mainly due to the fine actors, especially Kalina Liang as the sensitive, troubled Chloe. and Chris Sullivan as a loving family man trying to keep the peace in a frightening situation. Their performances are haunting in every sense of the word.
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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.
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'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.
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'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.
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Let's get down to business. Fruitcake. All right.
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'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.
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'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.
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'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.
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R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Trauma has become so overused as a plot device that I'm grateful I went into Thunderbolts not knowing that it would plunge so deeply into its characters' mental health issues. The movie, directed by Jake Schreier from a script by Eric Pearson and Joanna Kahlo, may not be the most original treatment of those issues, but it's sincere and heartfelt in the way it approaches them.
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It also happens to be the most enjoyable Marvel adventure in some time. It isn't a self-satisfied joke like Deadpool and Wolverine, or a forgettable slog like this year's Captain America Brave New World. Thunderbolts is an unwieldy jumble, to be sure, and it's been designed, like all Marvel films, to help extend the brand unto infinity.
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R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
But for an impressive stretch, it actually looks and feels like a real movie, with solid action, vivid emotional stakes, and characters memorable enough that you won't mind seeing them again in the inevitable sequel. The star is the terrific Florence Pugh, who was introduced several movies back as Yelena Belova, the younger sister of Scarlett Johansson's now-deceased Natasha Romanoff.
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Like Natasha, Yelena is the product of a top-secret Russian program that turned innocent children into spies and assassins. Years later, Yelena still can't shake off the grim memories of her indoctrination or her grief over Natasha's death.
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Yelena now works as undercover muscle for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who's played by a breezily menacing Julia Louis-Dreyfus, with a touch of Veep-style incompetence. Valentina is bad news, and before long, Yelena is betrayed and trapped in a deadly lair in the middle of nowhere.
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To get out alive, she must join forces with a few other similarly betrayed and trapped operatives, some of whom have special powers. Hannah John Common plays Ghost, who can pass through walls. Wyatt Russell is enhanced super soldier John Walker, who's kind of like a surlier Captain America.
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And then there's a random nice guy named Bob, played by Lewis Pullman, who has no idea why he's there and appears to have no powers of any kind. But both he and the movie have a few surprises in store. In time, Yelena, Ghost, Walker, and Bob escape Valentina's clutches. But the danger never lets up, and they must work together to take her down.
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R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Fortunately for them, their ranks soon expand to include the Marvel mainstay Bucky Barnes, a formidable fighter with his own physical and psychological scars, well played as always by recent Oscar nominee Sebastian Stan. And then there's Yelena's boisterous adoptive father, a Russian expat limo driver who goes by the superhero moniker of Red Guardian.
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He's played by a bumbling, scene-stealing David Harbour. In time, this ragtag crew began calling themselves the Thunderbolts, a name inspired by a youth soccer team that Yelena was a part of years ago. Like that team, Yelena and her unlikely comrades are a scrappy bunch of underperformers. basically a third-rate Avengers. The story is unapologetically formulaic.
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R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Valentina's scheme, which involves turning the Thunderbolts into a public enemy, smacks a bit of Pixar's The Incredibles, and every other Marvel movie that has featured a cataclysmic assault on a major city. But even amid such familiar mayhem, Schreier finds fresh, vivid angles. The action is clear and coherent. The character dynamics strike the right balance of earnest sincerity and glib humor.
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And it's oddly moving to see the characters put their bickering ways aside and team up to protect as many innocent bystanders as they can. For a brief moment, I was reminded of what made superhero movies fun in the first place, before they became Hollywood's dominant export. But Thunderbolts does have more than fun on its mind, and here's where that trauma element comes in.
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Yelena is continually haunted by reminders of her past – when she was forced as a child to become a ruthless killing machine. But she isn't the only character here confronting emotional pain and a profound sense of emptiness. The movie builds to a surreal sequence, an almost being-John-Malkovich-style romp through the subconscious, that floats some fascinating questions.
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What if loneliness were the single most destructive force in existence? And what if human connection really was powerful enough to save the world? That may sound like a trite sentiment, but it's nonetheless worth repeating. And for two hours or so, Thunderbolts just about makes you believe it.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Nobody does forbidden longing in far-off places quite like Luca Guadagnino. He whisked us off to Italy for the passionate affairs of I Am Love and Call Me By Your Name, gave us love and death on a Sicilian island in a bigger splash, and took us all across America in the cannibal romance Bones and All.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Now he's made queer, a moody account of thwarted longing that begins in an expat-heavy corner of Mexico City during the early 1950s, a world that Guadagnino brings to life in all its sweaty, scuzzy glory. The story follows an American drifter named William Lee, played by Daniel Craig with a louche smile and nary a hint of 007 elegance.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Addicted to booze and heroin, Lee spends his days hopping from bar to bar, hoping to lock eyes and more with the handsome young men he spots there and around town. And few are more handsome than Eugene Allerton, a freshly discharged U.S. Navy serviceman played by a terrific Drew Starkey.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
allerton is trim slender and aloof to the point of disdainful which makes lee lust for him all the more in time after a few meals and many drinks the two fall into bed in a scene that guadagnino films with both roughness and tenderness but once isn't enough for lee and he spends every minute trying to keep this enigmatic young beauty from slipping away
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
At one point, a drunken Lee approaches Allerton at a party and causes a bit of a scene, prompting a friend, Tom, to intervene.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Yeah. A cup of water, maybe? Lee is a fictionalized stand-in for the beat writer William S. Burroughs, whose years spent living in Mexico were eventful, to say the least. He began writing queer in 1952, while awaiting trial for the killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken game of William Tell.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Burroughs never finished the book, which was finally published in its incomplete form in 1985. By that point, he had become a countercultural icon, known for his boldly experimental works like Naked Lunch, his struggles with addiction, and his many sexual relationships with men and women. Guadagnino has said in interviews that he read Queer at a young age and has wanted to film it for years.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
That may surprise some of the director's fans, since his swoony romanticism, on display in the recent Challengers, isn't an obvious fit with the biting rawness of Burroughs' prose. At the same time, Guadagnino clearly likes to push against expectations, and his horror movies, like Suspiria, have shown a flair for the surreal and grotesque.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Even when Queer's narrative loses momentum, it's fascinating to see a filmmaker, known for his lush, beautiful surfaces, try to connect with a writer's famously uncompromising ugliness. For the first hour or so, the screenplay by Justin Kuritskas is largely faithful to its source.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
But things take a weird turn once Lee talks Allerton into a trip to South America, so they can find a psychedelic called Yahe, or ayahuasca, which can apparently confer telepathic powers. Deep in the jungles of Ecuador, Guadagnino essentially tries to imagine the mind-blowing ending that Burroughs never wrote.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
The director is clearly having fun, filling the screen with hallucinatory imagery, and introducing a gun-toting healer, played by an unrecognizable Leslie Manville.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
in one maddening and mesmerizing sequence a drugged-out lee and allerton dance silently in the nude their bodies twisting and melting together as though under a kaleidoscope guadagnino is working overtime to honor burroughs in the thoroughly bonkers epilogue set back in mexico he goes well beyond the parameters of the novel to weave in moments from the writer's tumultuous life
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
But the reason queer works as well as it does has everything to do with Craig's performance. It's worth remembering that long before he became James Bond, or a gay detective in the Knives Out movies, Craig played the tempestuous younger lover of the painter Francis Bacon in the 1998 drama Love is the Devil. He flips that equation brilliantly in Queer.
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Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
With robust physicality and delicate emotion, he shows us a man in wretched yet defiant thrall to his wants, for sex, for love, for a moment of out-of-body transcendence. It's a singular performance, but also, in its expression of pure desire, a deeply human one.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
The first movie is Nickel Boys, which is an adaptation of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead. This is the story of two young Black men, played by Ethan Harisi and Brandon Wilson. in 1960s Florida, who are sent to a reform school, which is putting it very charitably.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
And I can't say this better, of course, than Colson Whitehead himself, who has this to say about the place and its real-life inspiration.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
Immediately, you know, three years into its being opened, there were kids as young as six being shackled, put in solitary confinement. Every 15 years, there'd be an expose and talk of reform, and nothing happened until it finally closed in 2011. And I was shocked when it hit the national media. They found unmarked graves. They dug up the bodies and found kids with
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
shotgun pellets in their skeletons, blunt force trauma to their skulls. I felt that if there's one place like this, how many other stories are we not hearing about?
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
So this is obviously incredibly fraught, painfully difficult material that was inspired by a real place and by real stories.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
i i want to say too that what makes the movie extraordinary is the way that the director ramel ross uses the camera and he and his cinematographer joe mufre they basically adopt a first person point of view approach meaning that at any given point in the story you're seeing this story through the eyes of one of the two lead characters and
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
It's a risky choice, and there's a reason why most narrative films are not shot this way. Although it's not unprecedented. Yeah, but it comes off. It touches chords of feeling that I think a more conventional telling wouldn't have achieved. And I should also mention that...
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
This movie features a really, really great performance from Anjanue Ellis-Taylor, who has, I think, been doing really terrific work all her career, but especially recently and especially in film. Like, she was in Origin last year. She has another movie in which she's very strong in this season called Exhibiting Forgiveness.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
And in Nickel Boys, she plays the grandmother of one of the boys who is sent to this reform school. And it's a beautiful performance, and it lifts you even as you are watching this extremely, extremely painful story.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
My second choice is The Brutalist. And this is the third feature directed by the actor-turned-filmmaker Brady Corbett. It stars Adrian Brody in probably the greatest role and performance he's had since he won an Oscar for The Pianist. That was a long time ago. And in this film, he is again playing a Holocaust survivor, this time a man of Hungarian Jewish descent,
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
who before the war was a very accomplished brutalist architect. And the movie is all about how he comes to America and encounters in Pennsylvania a wealthy benefactor played by an absolutely terrific Guy Pearce. It's this hugely ambitious, big swing of a movie from...
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
a 36-year-old director who is aiming for the rafters like a young Orson Welles or Paul Thomas Anderson, making this really big movie about capitalism, about immigration, about Jewish assimilation, and eventually the exploitation of Jewish genius and labor in post-war America. And so there are a lot of really big themes swirling around this movie. It handles them very assuredly.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
I should also note, David, for everyone, this movie is three and a half hours long, including a 15-minute intermission. But I hasten to add, it flies by. It's incredibly absorbing. Don't be put off by the running time. Go and see it on the big screen, in 70mm if you can, because it's going to be showing in that format.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
During this time of year, people want a kind of prototypical holiday movie, something that will make them feel good. And I'm always sorry to disappoint people every year, but my favorites are probably best described as downers. These are not upbeat movies. No elf? Santa! Oh, my God! Santa here? I know him. Oh, I love Elf.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
My third movie is called Hard Truths. And this is the latest picture from the English filmmaker Mike Lee of movies like Topsy Turvy and Vera Drake. And Mike Lee, it's worth noting, he has a very particular style. He works very closely with his actors in a very rigorous and somewhat mysterious workshop process.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
And from this process emerges a very tightly structured script and some of the best performances you'll ever see in the English language, frankly. And Hard Truths features, I think, the performance of the year from Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who worked with Lee before in Secrets and Lies, received an Oscar nomination for that movie.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
And here, almost 30 years later, she's back and playing a completely different character, a profoundly, profoundly unhappy person who just spends the movie sort of lashing out at everyone's sight, which doesn't sound like a fun way to spend your movie.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
It is Mike Lee's wheelhouse. I mean, this is his great subject. He really taps into anger, and I think his great theme, or one of them, is the uneven distribution of happiness. And why are some people happy, and why are some people just not? And it sounds like a very simple thing, and from this, though, he gets so much complexity.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
And this is a character played by Marion Jean-Baptiste, who you would not want to be in the same room with her, but you absolutely want to see her on the big screen.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
I was riveted. And it's a very funny, a painfully funny performance at times. And I think people are almost scared to admit that this is actually a very entertaining, but also very forceful and devastating and angry movie. And I know, not an orthodox recommendation.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
There is always Elf.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
Thank you so much, David.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
It's a staple. I am taking my eight-year-old to Moana, too, so I am hopeful about that one.
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Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season
make us happy. Yeah, it's funny. I return to the words of Roger Ebert, who once said, no good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing. And so, These are not happy movies, but they are among the most thrilling that I've seen this year, and I recommend them in a theater wholeheartedly.