Superhero origin stories typically center on a hero coming into their power and realizing the responsibilities therein. In studio-made films, this arc is accompanied by flashy costumes, super-villains, and elaborate action sequences. But as the superhero genre evolves, inventive indies are pushing their tropes into thrillingly unexpected new realms. In Fast Color, writer/director Julia Hart uses the superhero origin structure to explore the struggles and glory of becoming a mother. [Read more…]
Teen Spirit Has More Heart, Better Bangers Than A Star Is Born
The rise to fame story’s moves so familiar that audiences can dance it blindfolded. Enter the undiscovered talent, raw but passionate. Their circumstances are grim. There may be poverty, family tragedy, and/or abuse. Still, they cling to the hope that music might save them. They find that one person in the room who believes in them. They rocket into the spotlight. But fame is not easy. Sex, drugs, and rock star decadence comes hard on the heels of glamorous makeover that turns them from ordinary to icon. Then–somewhere amid the glitz and grit–they trip through an important life lesson that gives the audience a cozy — even smug — sense of satisfaction. In his directorial debut Teen Spirit, actor turned writer/helmer Max Minghella plays off clichés, offering a drama that is as surprisingly intimate, beautiful, and bittersweet. [Read more…]
The Storm of History: Sergei Bundarchuk’s War and Peace
The movies now give us an “epic” nearly every week of the year. Digital technology, corporate budgets and the public’s own current thirst for shallow escapism have paved the way for visions both ludicrous and wondrous. Chiseled, tattooed ruffians bestrode kraken-like monsters in Aquaman, cyborgs levitate from futuristic cities buried in trash in Alita: Battle Angel. But what do these films have to say? As we wallow in popcorn excess, Janus Films restores and re-releases the grandest, deepest epic of all, Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. Made in 1967, it shames everything, and I mean absolutely everything, playing at the ArcLight today. Slated for a June release on DVD and Blu-Ray by the Criterion Collection, it is touring various arthouse spots and must be seen on a proper, wide canvas. Your humble correspondent was lucky enough to catch such a screening at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. It will grace the Egyptian in Hollywood on April 27. [Read more…]
The Wind Is A Savage And Insightful Horror-Western
Tales of the Wild West often focus on cowboys who conquer tough terrains and ruthless foes with their glistening guns and macho bravado. Bucking convention with The Wind, screenwriter Teresa Sutherland and director Emma Tammi dust off a forgotten and frightening real-life phenomenon that terrorized the pioneering women of the west. And the result is a horror-western as savage as it is insightful. [Read more…]
Transit Offers Old-School Romance And Timeless Tragedy
The cruelest twist of history is how it mercilessly repeats. As the dust of World War II settled, German author Anna Seghers wrote Transit, a novel that centered on a concentration camp escapee fleeing Nazi forces. While headlines and political propaganda might paint refugees are invading swarms, Seghers’ book aimed to restore the personhood of these people, sharing their stories to display their humanity. 75 years later, the debate over refugees still rages regularly. Which might explain why German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s adaptation of Transit is obliquely placed, making its setting as timeless as its harrowing tale. [Read more…]
Them That Follow Delivers A Striking Coming-Of-Age Drama About Snake Handlers
To most, a slithering snake might inspire fear. But to Mara (Alice Englert), in the new film Them That Follow, these creatures are beautiful, strong, and hold deep ties to her faith. Mara is a snake handler, part of a Pentecostal sect rooted deep in the woods of Appalachia. Like the snakes they use in their worship, these people are fiercely loyal, keeping to their own on a remote mountain. Martial engagements are made within their church community, involving all in a proposal process that includes quilting, snake-hunting, and a public acceptance. They avoid outsiders, like the police who will snatch their snakes, as well as their members, whenever possible. And if one of their members should be bit, they reject modern medicine, seeing the bite not as a health concern but a God-ordained test of faith. This life is all Mara has ever known. But as she grows into womanhood, her faith is rattled. [Read more…]
Lupita Nyong’o Slays Comedy, And Zombies, In Little Monsters
All hail Lupita Nyong’o, the Scream Queen of SXSW! On Opening Night, the Academy-Award winning actress shocked and awed the packed house at the Paramount Theater with Us. In dueling roles, she gracefully and ruthlessly filled the audience with tension and terror. The following day, she returned to the Paramount for a victory lap, fronting the outrageous zombie-comedy Little Monsters. It was a one-two punch that deftly establishes Nyong’o’s range as well as her status as modern-horror royalty.
Jordan Peele’s Us Is a Bold And Brilliant Follow-Up To Get Out
Jordan Peele has done it again. In 2017, the comedian turned filmmaker with a blisteringly funny and soul-rattlingly scary directorial debut Get Out. The horror film was universally praised, instantly iconic, and went on to win Peele an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. So, anticipation has been through the roof for his follow-up, Us. As SXSW’s Opening Night film, Us drew crowds that wrapped around the city blocks of downtown Austin. People lined up for 2 to 6 hours just in the hopes they’d get to be in the room for its world premiere. After over two hours in line, this critic barely made the cut. I was number 21 of the last 75 people who would gain entrance. As soon as I walked through the doors of the Paramount, the excitement in the air was electric. The whole theater throbbed with anticipation. When Peele took to the stage to introduce the film, the audience erupted in cheers and applause. Over the next two hours, we would gasp, scream, laugh, and pulse together with tension as Us barreled into a mind-bending third act. Which is to say, it was a huge hit with us. [Read more…]
Jan Švankmajer’s Insects: On Meaning in Surrealist Film
Last year, Jan Švankmajer, the great master of surrealist cinema, returned to his roots with another stop-motion film mixed with live footage in the same vein as his classics Alice (1988) and Faust (1994). Yet there is something that is immediately striking in Insects (2018), namely that it keeps breaking the fourth wall and working with meta-levels. There is, first, an introduction where Švankmajer speaks directly to the audience, offering cues to how the movie is supposed to be understood. Then, throughout the film we see how the practical and stop-motion effects were created; we witness various stage directions to the actors, who each talk about their dreams to the camera. Finally, as Insects is somewhat of an adaptation of a play by the brothers Čapek, we ourselves witness an amateur theatre group working on its adaptation. [Read more…]
Climax Is A Willful Assault On Your Senses. But Is That All There Is?
Gaspar Noé is drawn obsessively to the dark and decadent corners of human experience. Squalor, sexual taboos, substance abuse, and violence are as crucial to his toolkit as handheld cameras and eye-popping color as he spins carnal stories of love and fury. With Climax, this Argentine provocateur explores passion and fear by following a dance troupe through a life-changing night of partying, panic, and LSD. [Read more…]
Isabelle Huppert Is Divinely Deranged In Neil Jordan’s Psycho-Biddy Thriller, Greta
What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? Mommie Dearest and Sunset Boulevard. There’s a glorious freedom to the psycho-biddy genre. Playing deranged dames whose sanity has been shattered by loneliness, iconic actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Gloria Swanson are given cart blanche to go wild in tales of female rage that are scandalous, grotesque, and often unapologetically campy. Writer/director Neil Jordan (Interview With A Vampire, The Crying Game) extends this grand opportunity to Isabelle Huppert with Greta. The French luminary makes a feast of its tale of female fury, chewing the scenery with a gruesome relish, then licking her chops, leaving us craving more. [Read more…]
Birds of Passage Is A Haunting And Outstanding Gangster Drama
In 2015, Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra won the world’s attention with his Oscar-nominated Embrace The Serpent, a bold black-and-white drama that followed an Amazonian tribesman as he leads white scientists into the wild in search of a curative plant. Culture clash also plays at the heart of his much-anticipated follow-up, Birds of Passage (A.K.A. Pájaros de verano), which was Columbia’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language Academy Award this year. In the 1970s, the Wayúu community of northern Colombia’s Guajira Desert was dedicated to its traditions, observant of omens, and suspicious of outsiders. But as an emerging drug trade gave them access to wealth and power, their community became less isolated and less united. [Read more…]
Alone Within the Revolution: Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment
The writer wanders the seaside of a great island lost in his own thoughts, lovesick and grappling with a changing world. Such is the enduring image of Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s masterpiece Memories of Underdevelopment, which remains the greatest jewel of Cuban cinema. First released in that fevered year of 1968 to worldwide acclaim, it remained largely unavailable in the United States for decades, eternally referenced in film scholarship yet not easy to actually view. Now thanks to the Criterion Collection, it has returned to us, beautifully remastered and stunningly relevant. Made when the Cuban Revolution was merely a decade old and still enflaming passions in the hemisphere, it now speaks to us in a restless yet post-revolutionary moment, when its audience sees it from a the vantage point of dashed dreams and uncertain hopes. When Alea first made this movie his protagonist was an intellectual questioning himself within a society determined to inaugurate a Marxist future, today he would feel at home in a world where nobody can say what is coming. [Read more…]
Asghar Farhadi Misfires With Abduction-Thriller Everybody Knows
Everybody knows. It’s not just a title. It’s a promise. It’s a threat. It’s a bombshell. In a cozy, sun-dappled village outside Madrid, everybody knows Laura (Penélope Cruz) and Paco (Javier Bardem) were childhood sweethearts. Everybody knows their break-up was brutal and strange, with her leaving for Argentina while leaving Paco her share of her family’s land. Everybody knows Laura’s husband is wealthy and too busy to join her at her sister’s wedding. But when her happy homecoming is derailed by a shocking abduction, nobody knows who might be to blame. In this time of impossible despair, Laura and Paco become uneasy allies in this treacherous terrain of ransom, resentments, distrust, and deeply buried family secrets. [Read more…]
Velvet Buzzsaw Offers Artfully Dark Fun, But Makes A Mess Of Its Horror
With Nightcrawler, writer/director Dan Gilroy teamed with Jake Gyllenhaal for a deliciously vicious evisceration of news media’s “if it bleeds it leads” culture with a format that was one-part thriller to one-part dark comedy. The result was a film that was wickedly entertaining and thought provoking, while proving Gyllenhaal is one of the most exhilarating actors of his generation. For all these reasons, I was positively giddy in anticipation of the pair’s reunion, Velvet Buzzsaw. Here Gilroy satirizes the snooty and sordid world of high art by blending dark humor and horror. But to my horror, lightning doesn’t strike twice. [Read more…]
Walk to Vegas Has Legs, And Is A Sure-Footed Comedy To Boot
In the character-driven lineage of such classics as Goodfellas, Big Lebowski, and True Romance; Walk to Vegas (written by Vincent Van Patten and Steve Alper; directed by Eric Balfour) features a brotherhood that operates on an informal black-market economy impervious to the rules of law, other than the innate sense of honor established through direct eye contact, firm handshakes, and camaraderie. It is a den of high-stakes Hollywood gamblers continuously engaging one another in ever-more outrageous ante-upping, dares and bets that culminate in our protagonist, Vincent VanPatten, attempting a walk from LA to Vegas in seven days in a suit. The characters of this instant classic — played by such greats as Eileen Davidson, Jennifer Tilly, Danny Pardo, Paul Walter Hauser, and James VanPatten, are straight out of Cervantes. The result: pure comic genius. [Read more…]
If Beale Street Could Talk, Where Love Is Not Enough
There is a scene in Barry Jenkins film adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk, a novel by visionary James Baldwin, that details American racism without a word. Tish, the protagonist and narrator of the story, is working behind a perfume counter at a department store. She is visibly pregnant. Her job is not one typically given to ‘Negro’ girls, but this store considers itself progressive, and so she is allowed to offer the newest fragrance by spraying it on the back of the hands of passers by. A white man approaches and wordlessly grabs her hand instead, bringing it to his nose and lips where he sniffs her skin intimately. Tish, portrayed in a luminescent tour de force performance by 19-year-old newcomer Kiki Layne, is visibly uncomfortable but cannot recoil: not only is it her job, but this is early 1970s New York, where the Civil Rights Movement is over yet legalized racism remains right around the corner. Her discomfort is written all over her face, tinged with fear. Silently, he grips her wrist in a display of ownership – mimicking that of slavery, when white people did claim ownership of Black bodies, before releasing her and walking away. [Read more…]
Tito And The Birds Is A Visually Stunning Tale For Our Times
Fear can act as a sickness, making us quake and quiver before falling petrified and useless. Fear can spread like a virus, contaminating whole communities, pitting people against each other and the wider world. In the Brazilian animated film, Tito and the Birds, this simile is made literal as an eye-catching and important parable for kids. [Read more…]
Bodies, And Limits, Beyond The Norm In Touch Me Not
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx
At the start of Touch Me Not, which opened the 2018 Romanian Film Festival in New York City, two men set up a device involving a glass plate and a camera. This is followed by a panning shot in shallow focus detailing the landscape of a male body, skin, hair, follicles, moles. The movement of the camera and its focus are perfectly controlled: light floods the body evenly, leaving no shadows, resulting in a flat objectivity with no physical feature being favored over another. The blurred face of Adina Pintilie, the director of Touch Me Not, appears on the glass plate. She is talking to someone about the film, questioning their relationship: “Why did you not ask me about the film? Or was it me being relieved you don’t ask?” A disembodied woman’s voice replies. The camera turns to reveal, Laura, who is played by Laura Benson, or who is Laura Benson. A svelte woman in her 50s with a mane of dark hair, the seasoned English actor has worked with Patrice Chéreau and other directors known for their exploratory approach to drama. [Read more…]
Dick Cheney’s Imperial Shadow Looms Large in Adam McKay’s Vice
One can only imagine what the great Roman historians like Tacitus and Suetonius would write about our own imperial moment. From rugged colonial stock the union sprout, liberated itself from the British crown, declared itself the United States, expanded in both territory and military might, and birthed characters like Richard Bruce Cheney. Forever imbedded in the world’s bloody consciousness as “Dick,” Cheney’s shadow looms large over the last 40 years of American history in Adam McKay’s brilliant, savagely insightful Vice. It is both a biography of power and a reckoning with the republic’s spiral into a capitalist behemoth straddling the globe. Some may be taken aback by McKay’s sense of dark comedy, in which the halls of power are exposed as a nest of minds which are not particularly cultured, but ruthlessly focused on the wielding of influence for profit and control. In that great American tradition going back to Mark Twain and Gore Vidal, McKay is using his own art form as a tool of scorching iconoclasm, rendering official histories to dust and transforming Dick Cheney himself into a figure both titanic and tragic. It falls on Christian Bale and Amy Adams’s shoulders to embody figures full of pain and ravenous villainy who perform their drama on the world stage. [Read more…]