Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, when she was 39 years old. By this time she was a divorced single mother of two sons and a respected teacher with a master’s degree in English from Cornell. She was an established a senior editor at Random House, the only Black woman in that position at the publisher. She’d championed Black authors and emphasized Black literature in the mainstream, including developing and strategically bringing out autobiographies by such Black Power luminaries as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali. She was a close friend of influential participants in the Black Arts Movement, like the poet Sonia Sanchez. Yet in Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, the most recent documentary released on Morrison, she recalls being unwilling to submit The Bluest Eye, a novel about a little Black girl that longs above all else to have blue eyes, to Random House because she was, in her own words, “Just an editor. Not a writer.” [Read more…]
Waad And Hamza al-Kateab, Edward Watts, On Syria And Their New Film, For Sama
For Sama is an extraordinary journey into war through the intimate lens of a woman who, in the course of five grueling years, also becomes a mother. From the 2011 uprisings in Aleppo, Syria, to her daily life in an area under never-ending siege, director Waad al-Kateab offers an unprecedented look into the lives of civilians held hostage under the oppression of what they refer to as “The Regime” — Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad regime — amid the shadows of global politics. [Read more…]
Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale Is A Savagely Brilliant Masterpiece
It’s rare that a press screening comes with a warning. But in the wake of reported walkouts, invites to see Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale came with a warning. In red font, critics were alerted that the film would contain “sexual violence towards women, violence towards children, and violence motivated by racism.” Since the film’s Venice premiere last fall, some have criticized Kent for the brutality found in her much-anticipated follow-up to her breakthrough debut The Babadook. However, considering her sophomore effort is a revenge-thriller that explores the sins of colonialism, the brutality is essential to its message. To capture the merciless of this domineering mindset, Kent won’t look away from its violence and depravity. And she won’t let us look away either. [Read more…]
Bursts Of Wild Yet Middling Cinema In Villains
We’ve met lovers like Jules and Mickey before in movies like Badlands, Natural Born Killers and, of course, Bonnie and Clyde. They are partners in crime, metaphorically and literally, kicking off Villains with a smash-and-grab robbery that’s given a bit of flare by the animal masks they choose to wear. As they dash off in their getaway car, Jules (Maika Monroe) excitement translates into titillation, and she’s all over an elated Mickey (Bill Skarsgård) as he drives. But their plan to hightail to a beach and easy living hits a snag when they run out of gas. [Read more…]
The Aesthetic Of Nostalgia In Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood
Nostalgia has replaced epochs in the modern culture. There is the increasing feeling that while technology certainly races ahead in its advancement, culturally we are obsessively looking to the past. Vinyl is sought after by the kids who are convinced it sounds better than digitally remastered albums on CD or streaming. The look of videotape is being recreated for music videos and even entire film projects. Music scores are reviving the techno sheen of the 1980s. Millennials, having just missed out on the 80s and consuming art while growing up highly influenced by the 70s, are desperate to reach back. With consumer culture now defining the times and creating stagnation in any new art forms or styles, the past takes on a new glow. But few filmmakers can make art out of nostalgia quite like Quentin Tarantino. His new film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, defines nostalgia itself. In its look and sound it feels like a brain working in overdrive to recall a specific moment in its archived history. [Read more…]
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood Is A Messy And Wild Love Letter To…Hollywood
For his ninth (and possibly penultimate) film, Quentin Tarantino takes audiences back to the summer of 1969, where Hollywood was swinging and hippies seemed a harmless subculture. That is until the Manson Family murdered Sharon Tate and her friends in her mansion on Cielo Drive. Blending fact with lots of fiction, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood re-imagines this time as the fairytale its title suggests. But instead of white knights and princes, Tarantino offers stuntmen and TV cowboys. Instead of castles and lavish balls, he presents a celebrity-stuffed party at the Playboy mansion. Instead of an evil sorcerer or monster horde, there’s Charles Manson and his minions. And instead of a princess as a damsel in distress, Tarantino presents an enchanting ingénue who was killed in her prime. [Read more…]
David Crosby and Cameron Crowe on Capturing a Legendary Life in Remember My Name
At 77, the youthful fire inside David Crosby refuses to flicker out. The music legend makes this more than evident in the new, reflective documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name. A chronicle of his highs and lows, Crosby impressively allows this to be a work of complete, sometimes stinging honesty. Directed by A.J. Eaton with renowned director and journalist Cameron Crowe producing, Remember My Name leaves few stones unturned in Crosby’s life. In a sense he is a survivor from that last generation of creative minds who were heirs to the Romantic tradition. Born in the shadow of World War II, finding a voice in the tumultuous 60s, there’s more to a personality like Crosby than the mere tag of “old hippie.” From his drug abuse to writing iconic music and touring as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young before the group implodes amid intense squabbles, it’s all laid bare in this film. And that’s exactly how he wanted it. [Read more…]
Benjamin Naishtat’s Rojo And A Region’s Cinematic Reckoning
The cinema of the Andes is a haunted art form. Rojo is set in the Argentina of the 1970s, plotted and shot like a classic noir, with a dark political subtext. Like many of the best recent films from this particular South American country and its neighbor Chile, the crime genre is used to tackle the legacy of the neo-fascist military regimes that governed these countries during the Cold War. This adds a layer of richness to the storytelling you don’t find in most U.S. movies or shows about detectives and murder. Noir has of course always been a vehicle to express the deepest recesses of any society, going back to films made by German expatriates in the U.S. during and after World War II. Fleeing the Nazis, directors like Fritz Lang framed the American underbelly with titles like The Big Heat and Scarlet Street. Now it is Latin American directors coming of age in the lingering aftermath of political terror who are refurnishing the genre in new ways. [Read more…]
Firecrackers Is A Raw Nerve Of A Film And An Explosive Debut
“Why are you so angry all the time?” The heroines of writer/director Jasmin Mozaffari’s debut feature Firecrackers have plenty of reasons to rage. Living in poverty in a suffocatingly small Ontario town, recent high school graduates Lou (Michaela Kurimsky) and Chantal (Karena Evans) have little hope for their futures. All they see around them is squalor, crappy jobs, abusive boys, addiction, intolerance, and violence. This is why these battle-hardened besties, who throw punches as easily as f-bombs, have plotted a way out. For a year, they’ve scraped together the wages earned cleaning scuzzy motel rooms so they can runoff to New York. They’ve slung they’re possessions into a pair of garbage bags, compiled one thousand dollars into a tattered envelope, and arranged a ride with a pick-up truck-owning pal. But a horrid incident derails the pair’s plan, pitching them down a path littered with stinging tears, shattered glass, and wretched compromises. [Read more…]
The Deeper You Dig Makes Horror A Twisted Family Affair
It was an accident. A dark night. A remote road. A girl sledding alone. A man driving home. And just like that, 14-year-old Echo Allen is dead. A tragedy to be sure. But what happens next is true horror. By following her killer and the mother Echo has left behind, The Deeper You Dig explores grief and guilt while traveling down a twisted road into the supernatural. [Read more…]
The Art of Self-Defense Makes A Menacing Joke Of Toxic Masculinity
You probably think you can kick Jesse Eisenberg’s ass. Which makes him perfectly cast as the protagonist of The Art of Self-Defense, a dark comedy exploring the allure and dangers of toxic masculinity. Writer/director Riley Stearns applies a crisp and dark sense of humor to a low-key thriller about one man’s quest to become the thing that scares him most: a man’s man. [Read more…]
Nick Broomfield on Muses and Bohemian Memories in Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love
Nick Broomfield is now 71 years old, and while he has not lost the feisty, investigative energy of a born muckraker, he is now continuously traveling back into the past. In his memories, two figures have been manifesting themselves as of late: Leonard Cohen, poet, songwriter, almost mystical icon and Marianne Christine Ihlen, Cohen’s muse whom he first encountered on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s. Broomfield’s new documentary, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, chronicles not only Cohen’s development as an artist but his more intimate self as well, and the love affair that stayed with him until the very end. [Read more…]
Captive State And The Sacrificial Maze Of Mutiny
Captive State was initially misunderstood. Released in March, it received mixed reviews, described by some critics as ‘murky,’ ‘lugubrious,’ and ‘unexciting.’ Despite star turns by brooding young upstart Ashton Sanders (Moonlight, Native Son), indie darling Jonathan Majors (The Last Black Man In San Francisco) and industry veteran John Goodman, it grossed only $8 million against a $25 million dollar budget, making it a box-office bomb. But this film has the density and complexity to develop a cult following of its own in the coming years. It’s depiction of a group of political anarchists attempting to overthrow an alien-controlled government is inventive, if not downright ingenious, and their foundational codes — the ideals for which these men and women live and die for — are as equally powerful and persuasive as they are heartening, yet no less disturbing. [Read more…]
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
Will we ever see the likes of Bob Dylan again? It is a question easily inspired by Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a sprawling, indeed thundering chronicle, now streaming on Netflix, of one of the American bard’s most legendary travels across the United States. What made this particular venture unique was the transitional phase the country was enduring, emerging from the tumult of the 1960s, its self-trust scarred, possibly beyond repair. Fittingly, this tale is told by Martin Scorsese, not only a great filmmaker but an artist obsessed with the past. [Read more…]
Ari Aster’s Midsommar Is A Horrifying And Exhilarating Follow-Up To Hereditary
“I wrote this while going through a break-up,” Ari Aster said at the special advance screening of Midsommar. “I’m better now.”
The filmmaker’s darkly humorous confession played well to the crowd at Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, where press and select members of the public gathered to see Aster’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his wildly praised debut, Hereditary. As the crowd chuckled at Aster’s softly spoken introduction, a mix of excitement and anxiety hung in the air. With his first film, Aster had offered a scorching exploration of family trauma with a unique brand of horror grounded by an impeccable performance from a riveting leading lady. Basically, Hereditary was so outstanding, how could Midsommar possibly compete? [Read more…]
The Last Black Man In San Francisco
Life is stranger than fiction. Things happen without rhyme or reason, and we, the living, are pulled along, anchoring ourselves to friends, family, lovers; people, places, and things in an effort to stay afloat, to make sense of it all. In The Last Black Man in San Francisco the protagonist, a Black American named Jimmie Fails (played by himself and loosely based on his real life), is anchored to a house. His grandfather built it, he insists, and he’s drawn to it, returning repeatedly despite the fact that his family lost it in a wave of gentrification and it has had new owners for the last 12 years. They’re well-meaning older white liberals that were clearly beatnik artists once, dropping “hey man” into their sentences and saying they don’t want to call the cops if they catch him on the property again — but they will. It’s a thinly veiled threat couched in the kind of casual racism that hovers throughout the film, even after said owners lose the house themselves in a serendipitous twist of fate. [Read more…]
The Apocalypse Is Agreeably Upon Us In The Dead Don’t Die
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and we say, ‘Fine.’ That’s the criticism that cuts through Jim Jarmusch’s star-stuffed zombie-comedy The Dead Don’t Die, where the undead not only feast on human flesh but also gravitate toward the distractions they were obsessed with in life, be it coffee, cell phones, or Chardonaaaaaaay! It’s a strange journey that is savagely funny, sophisticated and unnerving. [Read more…]
The Flawed Yet Fine Gem Of All Creatures Here Below
All Creatures Here Below is a Midwestern tragedy that, scene by scene, grows incrementally more horrific. Tearing open the wounds of childhood trauma, the director, Collin Schiffli, and his writer, David Dastmalchian, immerse us in the desperate acts of a young runaway couple, then dare us to condemn them. [Read more…]
Dreaming Toward Redemption In A Great Lamp
Festival Winner at the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival
Opens July 8 at the Arclight
by Genie Davis
The narrative feature A Great Lamp is a beautiful black and white film from director Saad Qureshi and his highly collaborative cast and crew. The film has a real heart as well as a beautifully defined artistic aesthetic. It’s the meandering story of three almost-lost souls seeking redemption: not from others, but from themselves, or the spiritual glow of that riverfront street lamp they hover under. There’s Max, an open-hearted, non-binary street kid posting flyers as a tribute to his late, much loved grandmother throughout the town; Gene, a drop-out from his job as an insurance processor – something he hated, but he still hides the fact that he left from his father; and Howie, an out of towner who fears a recurring dream, and whose mother may or may not have died, and who above all else hopes to view a rocket launch through binoculars. [Read more…]
The Perfection Is A Masterful And ‘Deeply Fucked Up’ Thriller
Things are not what they seem in Richard Shepard’s sharp and sinister thriller The Perfection. Get Out’s Allison Williams stars as Charlotte Willmore, who was a child prodigy on the cello until her path to greatness was thwarted by a family tragedy. Ten years later, Charlotte is finally free. And the first thing she does is reconnect with her former mentor Anton (Steven Weber), and Lizzie, the pretty protégé who took her place (Dear White People’s Logan Browning). Initially, it seems this might be a tale of ruthless rivalry between Lizzie and Charlotte. But that’s just the beginning of this masterful thriller that throbs with suspense and surprises. [Read more…]