treywillwest Reviews

Coup de Chance (2023)

Nope

[8/10 · 10 April 2024]

The 88 year old Woody Allen has said in interviews that "Coup de Chance", his 50th feature as writer-director, will probably be his last. This would be a wise decision on the part of the auteur as he will be bowing out on a high note. This is a very fine, and fittingly finaleal work for his career, encompassing many of the themes that have always most concerned him and serving as a kind of correction, it seems to me, to some of his earlier works. "Coup de Chance" is a very assured, often tense thriller that implies a profoundly absurdist sense of the cosmos.

It is also, if nothing else, one of the finest looking films Allen has ever made. For his last several movies he has collaborated with the great, Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storraro. Their previous collaborations have seem labored to me, in no small part because several of them were, simply, bad movies. But even overlooking that, Allen's spaces struck me as too domestic, too intimate, for Storraro's almost by default epic lighting. Here, Allen, Storraro, and set crew Veronique Melery, Gilles Boillot, and Geraldine Laferte synthesize a world of colors with which Storraro can fully display his magic. Every room feels like entering another world, but not in a way that distracts or seems artificial.

Thematically, Allen's work will always, by his own design, be compared to that of his hero, Ingmar Bergman. It is easy to think of Allen's world as a kind of Bergman-lite as most of Allen's films would be described as comedies whereas many of Bergman's are oppressively "serious". But in fact Allen's world is much colder than that of his hero. For Bergman, all the sound and fury of reality is usually redeemed by some metaphysical glory- Love, Art, the promise of the Divine in the very silence of God.... For Allen, the world is simply godless and meaningless, though, by his own account, he hasn't always expressed that as well as he wished.

One of Allen's most beloved movies, "Hannah and His Sisters", is one of the filmmaker's least favorites from his oeuvre. I can understand why. "Hannah" comes off as finding affirmation and meaning in existence, when all it sets out to do is find a reason, however petty and remote, not to commit suicide. In the famous scene where Allen's character decides against killing himself while watching a Marx Brothers film, it is easy to misinterpret the Marx Brothers as Allen's divine messengers. But they are not Divine, they are not even geniuses. They are just funny clowns that distract one from the desolate facts of life.

Allen is often disparaged as a prissy intellectual. Indeed, his canonical name-dropping can become precious and tiresome. But in many ways Allen is an anti-intellectual. Rather, he is an escapist, and this is what makes his world so cold. In an almost reverse-Heideggerean way, Allen suggests that thought that confronts the "authentic" reality of human being can only reasonably lead to despair, indeed suicide. It is only in resisting such "authentic" realism that a human being can hope to persevere.

The last words in Allen's last film echo. "Better not to dwell on it," on our actual condition. Only then might we fool ourselves ("fool" being an operative word) into experiencing joy.

About Dry Grasses (2023)

nope

[9/10 · 29 February 2024]

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is probably the most confrontationally ambitious filmmaker working today. This doesn't necessarily make him the best. Indeed, there are times when you can feel him reaching for a greatness that the likes of Arichitapong Weerasthakul or Bela Tarr make seem easy. Nonetheless, Ceylan takes on the "Big Themes" with a Herculean boldness. He's the "old school great film artist" of today. His work sometimes feels like it belongs more in the era of Bergman or Bresson than today, but that doesn't make it any less impressive.

Ceylan's new film, "About Dry Grasses", is one of his best. The main character, Samet (played by Deniz Celiloglu in an at times overly intense performance), incarnates many of Ceylan's consistent concerns. Like many of the director's characters he is a secular intellectual, or at least he is striving to be one, to throw off the non-secular culture around him. In this, these characters reflect Turkey itself, a predominantly geographically and culturally Asian, Muslim nation that, since the inception of its modern state, has openly striven to become a secular, European one. He thinks too much, which is not to say too well, but this thoughtfulness is often a disguise or an excuse for a resentful selfishness.

Indeed, Samet is one of Ceylan's least likable main characters. At times, his actions disgust us. But the wisdom of the film comes with the acknowledgement that the decisions made by this quasi-anti-villain do not, in fact, amount to actual villainy. Samet is not who he, or we, wish him to be. But neither is humanity, or the world it inhabits. Time, the fact that life literally goes on despite our intentions, bestows on the living the transformative ability to apologize and forgive. (Hannah Arendt would, I think, have liked this movie.)

Ceylan is one of cinema's greatest landscape artists. Although "About Dry Grasses" consists mostly of interiors, the exterior scenes are breath taking. The small village Samet teaches in is supposed to be bleak and ugly and in some sense it is. But there is a sublimity to the revelation of these monotonous snow-scapes. Ceylan's landscapes give his films a singularly sensual quality. A viewer feels the chill of the town and the relief of a building with central heating or, to a less relieving degree, a fire, stove, or cup of hot tea. When winter finally breaks it seems a kind of existential reprieve.

One last note, while this is very much Samet's story, Celiloglu's is not the film's best performance. That goes to the Cannes-award-winning Merve Dizdar, whose performance is as smoldering as that of Celiloglu's, but also decidedly more restrained. The supporting cast, including young Ece Bagci, are generally excellent.

Alps (2011)

nope

[8/10 · 10 November 2023]

"Alps", Yorgos Lanthimos's second feature, strikes me as the strongest of the films that he has directed and written. It is at once his most elliptical and, this phrase will come to seem ironic, lived-in movie. I say the latter because "Alps" lacks the autueral characteristic I least appreciate about the filmmaker's other works- a subtle but unmistakable self-congratulation as to how clever he is being. At certain moments Lanthimos's other films remind me of those of the Cohen Brothers at their worst or Wes Anderson every second of every day. This is especially problematic for Lanthimos as his worlds are so very dark and abusive. This director's worst scenes remind me a bit of Michael Hanaeke's only truly insufferable film(s)- "Funny Games".

In its strange way "Alps" might seem like Lanthimos's most humane film because its core topic is the attempt to offer closure for others by experiencing empathy with the dead. (By offering solace and experiencing empathy they receive personal profit, all of which Lanthimos seems to suggest have become inextricably intertwined in late-capitalism.) But profit is clearly not the only motive for embodying the dead, at least for the character known only as the Nurse. Her namelessness again seems ironic as she might be the most fully formed character in Lanthimos's oeuvre, even if what Angeliki Papoulia's excellent performance most instills is a sense of a self lacking reflection.

The theme of embodying an other and the seriality that implies links "Alps" to the recent films of Brandon Cronenberg- "Possessor", "Infinity Pool", to which it is nonetheless far superior. The addictive quality of becoming-other, and indeed of becoming and embodying the past, seems to come for both Lanthimos and Cronenberg from the insufferability of the present. Perhaps there is more freedom (of interpretation? But perhaps also action?) in the recitation of the past than in the commodified present in which abusive authoritarianism has become the only thoroughfare to "connection". In our historical moment even the most "personal" of expressions, the ending suggests, are won by subservience.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

nope

[9/10 · 7 November 2023]

It is easy to think of fictional narration as more malleable than its factual equivalent. Indeed, one can project whatever opinions one has about a fictional tale onto the narration and think of these opinions as "part of the story." But then again one can also do this with reality as contemporary American political rhetoric clearly demonstrates.

In the strictest sense, though, fiction may be less resolvable than fact. Factual evidence can come to light after an event that determines the valid interpretation of said event. In fiction, however, what is left unwritten or shown can never be ultimately resolved because there simply is no factual truth to which one can relate a claim or an interpretation. Writer-director Justine Triet takes brilliant advantage of this aspect of narration in her film, "Anatomy of a Fall".

As has already been suggested, what can and cannot be known about an event is the key question of "Anatomy". The film also asks us how much we can know a person, or character, by drawing one so convincingly and complexly that the indeterminacy of their guilt or innocence of a possible crime seems simultaneously impossible and undeniable.

For a character in a movie to exist so fully for an audience an actor must embody them exceptionally well. It can be said without hyperbole that Sandra Huller gives one of the finest performances in any film in a long time as novelist Sandra Voyter. While the script by Triet and Arthur Harari is superb the sense of knowing, and not knowing, Voyter would not be as powerful had Huller been even slightly less extraordinary.

We genuinely like Voyter but as her intimate life is relentlessly exposed to the public, and the audience, she does come to seem a bit creepy. But, we must ask ourselves, how many of us would not seem so under such merciless scrutiny, especially in the context of our closest, and most private, relationships.

The young actor Milo Machado Graner also impresses as Voyter's son, Daniel. Although he does not have as much screen time as other characters Daniel could be said to be the film's real protagonist, as the story traces the boy arriving at his version of "the facts". This is a fully formed performance from a child-performer.

As this is a "review" I will, almost pettily, present my few reservations about the film. In one scene, a character essentially declares the movie's themes in one speech. There is nothing wrong with a work wearing its thematic material on its sleeve, but it could have been done less ham-fistedly.

More regrettably, there is a not-even-half realized "romantic subtext" between Voyter and her attorney, Vincent. This aspect of the story is so unnecessary it feels like clutter in the midst of an otherwise perfectly ordered room. As a character Vincent is the sexy Frenchman par excellent. That he is played by Swann Arlaud feels almost like type-casting. The many scenes in which Vincent/ Swann speak English made me think of Pepe Le Pew.

But these are some minor objections to what is a truly exemplary piece of work. Triet has made a great film.

Earth Mama (2023)

Nope

[8/10 · 19 July 2023]

Writer-director Savanah Leaf makes an impressive and distinctive debut with "Earth Mama", a feature inspired by the filmmaker's earlier documentary short on the ordeals of Black mothers with children in the American foster-care system. The film that "Earth Mama" most immediately reminded me of was Ken Loach's "I, Daniel Blake" in that both are portraits of worlds dominated by bureaucracies, criminal at least as much for their incompetence and blindness as for their cruelty. In Leaf's work, more than that of Loach's, this bureaucracy is dominated, indeed defined by, power that is identified by its subjects as "other", in this case as "white".

Both Loach and Leaf leave some room for hope in their respective worlds. For Loach's more identity-empowered (white male) protagonist hope takes the form of rebellion, of finding one's agency, even if that agency cannot alter one's fate. Leaf, in fact, leaves more room for the possibility of survival and an eventual "happy ending" than does Loach. However, this hope is only reached by way of the fatalistic acceptance of one's own subjection to a system that even the African-Americans who work within it acknowledge is designed to harm Black lives. (For the other oppressed by white supremacy, survival IS rebellion.).

While this is a feature, Leaf does not abandon her documentarian instincts. In a style reminiscent of that of Alexander Kluge, Leaf has her performers momentarily and without announcement break from character to interview actual Black survivors of the foster care system, as well as mothers with children within it. The result is some movingly intimate, confessional cinema.

However much this film deals with real-life issues and occasionally with real life people, Leaf reveals herself to be a bit of a metaphysician. She finds beauty and hope in a pre-oppression "nature" (that may or may not be a world of pure imagination). Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes finds magic and meaning in the natural landscapes and water-scapes of the Bay Area. The film is extremely musical, with Kelsey Lu's haunting score quietly permeating almost every scene. Alternating from bluesy to sublime, Lu's work reflects that of Leaf's with a sense of beauty in a world bereft of much freedom, but not of hope.

The Night of the 12th (2022)

Nope

[7/10 · 28 June 2023]

"La Nuit du 12" has widely been compared to David Fincher's "Zodiac" and it is not difficult to see why. Both films detail investigations into murderous crimes that the audience knows from the outset were never solved. However, the two films draw distinctly different implications from this shared scenario.

"Zodiac" used its anti-catharsis as a launching point for a study of the unknowability of evil, and how its mystery can destroy even lives it does not directly touch. The murder at the heart of "La Nuit du 12" is unsolvable because it is all too comprehensible. The young woman who is burned alive while walking home from a party comes to seem the victim not so much of any one killer but of social patriarchy, or at least deeply intrenched misogyny.

I wouldn't call director/co-writer Dominik Moll's film feminist, for one thing all of the key characters are men, and rather macho ones at that. But this is definitely an anti-patriarchal work. The cop-characters, male inquirers into social "truth" seem unable to articulate a positive statement of fact other than that the order they uphold is not only unjust but also dysfunctional and ineffective. As they interview the victim's former partners they realize that any of them could be the killer simply because of the ways men relate to women, which comes to force the characters to confront the necessarily sexist paradigms through which they themselves try to comprehend the victim's behavior.

"There is something amiss between men and women" is the only conclusion the lead character can come to after a year long investigation, a realization that acknowledges a lack of comprehension as much as the attainment of any. The patriarchal mind cannot adequately contextualize even itself, much less its other. "It's a man's world," utters one of the few featured female characters and it seems a lament more than an observation as if she were asking "Why still? How much longer?"

The film's final scenes struck me as a shade too brightly optimistic for what is generally a very dark work. However even these scenes pay tribute to a secondary character who comes to seem the only one who makes a positively assertive act throughout the narrative: this character grows so sick of the film's patriarchal world that they refuse to be depicted within it any longer.

EO (2022)

Nope

[7/10 · 16 December 2022]

It's very difficult to make a live action drama with a donkey for a protagonist and not have your film compared to Au Hasard Balthazar. Indeed, the words "donkey" and "cinema" cannot be used in the same sentence without one (a cineaste, anyway) thinking "Bresson". Inevitable, then, that EO, Jerzy Skolimowski's new donkey epic, would be considered in relation to the classic French film. The truth, though, is that they are completely different works that show just how different two European dramas about donkeys can be.

One of the many great things about Bresson's film is that it uses the titular critter's non-humanness as such. All we know of Balthazar's existence is what the performer-donkey is able to express on its own. We can tell that they are hungry because we see them eating. We can tell that they are in pain when they cry out, or that they are tired when they lie down. This, Bresson is telling us, is all we need to know. One might say that Bresson, especially in his latter films, treated his human performers in much the same way. They use speech because these are sounds humans make. But we can't, the filmmakers will not, psychologize any of the living beings on screen. They all live and that is enough.

EO is a vastly different, um, animal. It's also a much more conventional one. This donkey is very psychologized. While it doesn't speak, it feels almost like a talking animal out of a Disney movie. We know by way of editing that Eo longs for certain things, has certain cherished memories, even experiences awe. Then again, there's nothing inherently wrong with anthropomorphizing animals for the sake of art. EO might be closer to Bambi than to Balthazar, but does not Bambi have its own kind of power?

EO, unlike the classic French film, is a road movie. In a way it's as much about the places and people that Eo encounters as it is about the donkey. This is a portrait of a contemporary Europe that Skolimowski clearly finds absurd. The tone of the movie reminded me of the irreverence of the Czech New Wave more than anything I've seen from Polish cinema.

This Europe might seem absurd but it looks pretty great in Michal Dymek's mostly impressive, occasionally overwrought cinematography. The film would be unthinkable without Pawel Mykietyn's score. There is, predictably, not much dialog, and the music here is as important as is the accompaniment to a silent film. But the musicality of the work is another way it completely distinguishes itself from Bresson's movie, which revels in silence. We need the music to tell us what Eo is feeling, and thus what we should feel as well.

Triangle of Sadness (2022)

nope

[6/10 · 22 October 2022]

Let me start by saying that I thought this a decidedly inferior work than writer-director Ruben Ostlund's previous film, The Square. Where the earlier movie seemed to expand the possibilities of satire, even transcend them, Triangle seems for much of its two and a half hours to cling to the genre's limitations. Indeed, I had essentially dismissed this film as a failure until it's poetically oblique ending which made me rethink the work as a whole. I will here warn that this review will in no small part be a meditation on that ending, and thus "spoiler warning" must apply here.

Triangle starts off well. We meet two of the primary characters, models Yaya and Carl, as they descend into a vicious argument over an initial attempt at an egalitarian transcendence of gender-roles. Thus, the central theme of Triangle is revealed to carry over from that of The Square: the inherently hierarchical (and thus oppressive) nature of social relations. There is no subject, Ostlund tells us, without subjection. The final, cruelest irony of Ostlund's universe is that the social is itself an attempt to escape subjection to the terrifyingly random violence of nature.

Unfortunately, after first introducing us to Carl and Yaya, the film transitions to its longest, most tiresome section which takes place on a luxury cruise for the super-rich. Triangle degenerates for more than an hour into a dishearteningly obvious political satire in which we "learn" that capitalism actually carries with it inherent inequality and extremely wealthy people are spoiled and clueless. At its worst, the "cruise segment" feels like an over-baked satire of over-baked satires.

There are a couple of highlights of even this (long) low-point of the film. Woody Harrelson impresses as a self-disgracing American Marxist cruise-ship captain. Harrelson's is the only turn aboard the cruise-ship that feels like a performance rather than a schtick (this includes those of Charlbie King as Yaya and Harris Dickinson as Carl, whose characters are, during the unfortunate second act, stripped of all that made them initially interesting). And Ostlund, DP Fredrik Wenzel, designers Josefin Åsberg, Gabriel de Knoop, Daphne Koutra and the rest of the crew create a woozily impressive spectacle during the Captain's Dinner segment. Indeed, there are some striking images throughout, especially during a night-time scene lit only with emergency flares.

After the ship is destroyed a few survivors end up on a remote island and different, less predictable hierarchies begin to assert themselves. This segment is more interesting than its predecessor but still has too many moments of ham-fisted "satire". It does bring into focus the character of Abigail, played by Filipino star Dolly De Leon in the film's most fully imagined performance.

And then, with that ending, Ostlund's more complex philosophical themes again reassert themselves. One of the characters finds themselves with a choice between usurpatory vengeance or restorational forgiveness. Philosophically, of course, it is a false choice between two versions of subjection. The final, haunting image is of subjectioned subjectivity: the object of desire whose identity is continuously repositioned along with the flux of power (some viewers will find the identity of this subject problematic, however). This last shot is the film's truest moment: subjectivity as terrified, battered consciousness swerving between points of power in a futile race to escape the brutalities of living-in-the-world.

Crimes of the Future (2022)

nope

[7/10 · 16 June 2022]

"Crimes of the Future" finds David Cronenberg reverting to the style and themes that inspired the terms "Cronenbergian" and, more recently, "body horror". Apparently made after Cronenberg had considered retirement, the film feels, somewhat like Scorsese's The Irishman, like a summation of the director's career. It's not surprising, then, that the filmmakers succumbed to the temptation to try to cram too much into one movie. If over-ambitious, "Crimes of the Future" is still an impressive, worth while piece of work.

It's definitely one of Cronenberg's most visually sumptuous movies. Set, presumably, in North America but shot in Greece, we are given the aesthetically beautiful but foreboding sense that the "New World" has gotten old and decrepit in this dystopian future. Narratively, if one wants to use that term, it most resembles the director's Videodrome and Naked Lunch, though it might actually feel more authentically Burroughsian than that later "adaptation". Also like those earlier works, "Crimes" is less concerned with telling a story than with creating a world that seems like the negation of both ours and its own. These are unsustainable, cancerous realities.

Cronenberg's central message here, and perhaps throughout his career, is that the only way humanity can survive is to stop being human. Either way, these are prophesies of extinction.

The Wasteland (2021)

Nope

[7/10 · 22 May 2022]

A beautifully Beckettian work about choosing the horror of life over the comfort of death. It also looks like Bela Tarr read too much James Joyce.

Maybe they could done more with those creepy dolls. Maximize that conflict as my screenwriting profs used to say.

Memoria (I) (2021)

nope

[9/10 · 12 April 2022]

I've previously described Apichatpong Weerasethakul as, at least, among the most distinctive filmmakers working today. If I had the slightest doubt about that it came from the fact that the director's previous features that I had seen have all been set in rural Thailand, a part of the world to which I've had no exposure. Perhaps I found the mise-en-scene so distinctive because this setting was unknown to me. Memoria lifted this slight doubt about the unmistakability of Weerasethakul's gaze as it is set in Columbia, and largely in modern metropolises. Nonetheless, no one but this Thai filmmaker could have lensed this work. The compositions and rhythms are as unmistakable as any in the Thailand-set movies.

Perhaps because he is here working in a foreign land and with foreign languages (English and Spanish) Memoria feels a bit more academic, a bit more self-consciously cerebral than the director's previous films which manage to seem simultaneously visionary AND intimate. There is also perhaps a barely more conventional narrative arch here than in the previous works, an arch I found slightly more predictable than those of the earlier pieces by this magical-realist. Nonetheless, I found the power of Memoria unique and overwhelming.

Being an exceptionally aspiritual person, I tend to distrust art that strives for the bona-fiedly cosmic (which Memoria, perhaps even more than Weerasethakul's earlier movies, most certainly does). Pieces that many find great and profound (I'm thinking 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Stalker) I find bloated and silly. But the cosmology of Memoria worked for me. Perhaps without intending to, the film seems to me to address Heidegger's notion that language is the house of being. Unquestionably, Weerasthakul is telling us, being is an utterance. But does being not transcend the organization of languaage, perhaps in fact it is best articulated in the stammer between words and the soundings of unforseeable collisions.

Titane (2021)

nope

[8/10 · 21 November 2021]

For all of "Titane"'s already infamous "ultra sex & violence" it is not simplistically nihilistic. One could, perhaps, call it inhuman, but if so, it is only to try to reach for a different kind of affirmation.

The opening act does amount to so much (effectively) aestheticized/ eroticized carnage and could, indeed, be described as nihilistically anti-human. But it is "anti" "human". The characters, even when they don't last long, are well drawn. And the revealed bodies are very... recognizable. The early part of the film is not so much hetero-erotic as omni-erotic but it is decidedly cis-genderal. Male and female, human and machine are unmistakably distinct. It is this humanity, that defined by boundaries of identity, that the film wishes to eviscerate.

The second section of the movie has an entirely different pace and tone. A mysterious, new character makes a choice, one not understood until near the film's end, reminiscent of that made by the characters in the recent work, "Lamb". But whereas the choice made in the Icelandic film is characterized as arrogant and selfish, that made in "Titane" is depicted as generously open-hearted and open-minded.

With this generosity, boundaries start to blur and break. The bodily imagery goes from hyper-eroticized and gendered to humble and androgynous. As the subjectivity at the heart of the film becomes less conventionally human, the film becomes more and more affirmational. By the end, the philosophy of the work could be described as "post-humanist" and the tone as "outlandishly moving".

Lamb (2021)

nope

[9/10 · 27 October 2021]

This extraordinarily assurred directorial debut from Valdimar Johannsson is a genre unto itself. It could perhaps best be described as a poetic-pastoral-family-drama-monster-art film.

Without wanting to give too much away, the narrative is structured like a Greek tragedy. It's a tale of human-parental hubris and its repercussions. The human beast must, is perhaps designed to, experience intense suffering, but by doing so restores the natural order, one that perhaps its very separation from that order inaugerates. To put it another way, the film turns the question of nature vs. Nurture into less of a question than a contest, even a war.

I've rarely if ever seen animals in a movie be so evocative. The "lead" sheep and the featured cat and dog all give what seem like bona fide performances. This is in no small part due to the exceptional work of cinematographer Eli Arenson who seems to have a genius for capturing the geography of critter faces. The close-ups of the various sheep and the cat reminded me of the at times eerily intimate animal portraits of the American photographer Peter Hujar.

Arenson and Johannsson also have a powerful eye for the Icelandic country-side. The landscapes reminded me of a lusher, in-color version of those of Bela Tarr, who served as an executive producer on the film. In general, the tone of the movie could best be compared to that of Tarr's films, but that is only a best-case comparison for what is an utterly original and unique work.

Again, the directing is truly extraordinary. Not only does Johannsson bring the best out of his three main, human performers but he creates a singular tone in this exceptionally chancy concept. In less masterful hands this story, which if simply verbally related sounds like the concept for a Monty Python skit, could have just come off as so much "Gonzo Weirdness!" Instead, it manages to be both allegorically and emotionally powerful and, perhaps most impressively, unpretentious.

The Square (2017)

nope

[9/10 · 16 July 2021]

I had put off watching this Palme D'Or winning film for a couple of years because the label "satire" had been attached to it and I tend not to be a fan of that sub-genre. Too often, satire treats its subject with such contempt that even in the most celebrated cases, "Dr. Strangelove", say, or "M*A*S*H", it presents itself as so above what it purports to be about that it ends up seeming apropos of nothing. That "The Square" transcends such genre traps is part of what makes it such a rewarding experience.

"The Square" is, indeed, a satire of the high (particularly contemporary) art world, and a very good one. Those familiar with this world will chortle at the film's pillorying of curatorial attempts to "say" what a work of art "means", and those of us who have engaged in such practices will wince as we chuckle. But this movie is also much more than that, and its ultimate subject is not just the art scene, but the nature of human interaction.

The main reason the film is set in a contemporary art museum isn't to mock this milieu but to demonstrate that even in such an edifice of "high culture" humanity has never really transcended the jungle. All of us scattered individuals are at the mercy of chance and of each other. We must continuously react to these threats and opportunities in order to survive, and this gives us very little time or opportunity to empathize with, and attempt to help, each other. But the illusion of order, culture, has imbued our species with an aspiration for altruism. This leaves the human animal in a double bind: not only can we not help each other, or get help from each other, we have to feel guilty about it.

DOP Fredrik Wenzel feels the screen with appropriately painterly colors. The hues are beautifully autumnal. Writer-director Ruben Ostlund's frames are very geometric. There are, indeed, a lot of squares on display in the film. Such architectural mise-en-scene would generally imply a fatalistic outlook, and it does so in some sense here. But there is a motif of squares within squares in which something surprising and chaotic suddenly occurs within one of the squares, affecting the totality even while being visually limited to its one level. The juxtaposition of geometric order and visual uncertainty implies a very unique world-view: chaotic inevitability.

As much as "The Square" pokes fun at the art-world it is in no sense an "anti-art" movie, as many such satires would end up being. For, in a very un-satirical way, it offers its characters, and its audience, empathy for our painful inability to empathize. "The Square" affirms the role of art by being first-rate art. Indeed, it leaves the viewer wondering if perhaps art isn't the only thing that can help us.

Ikiru (1952)

nope

[9/10 · 8 May 2021]

This justly celebrated work is often considered uncharacteristic of its auteur. I've heard it said that it more resembles an Ozu, than a Kurosawa film. I would argue that the only way in which it is un-Kurosawaian is in its subject matter, and even in this respect only superficially so.

It has become a cliche to say that of the three classic auteurs of Japanese cinema (Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi) that Ozu was the most "Japanese" where as Kurosawa was the most "western". The latter claim strikes me as undeniable. Kurosawa's indebtedness to John Ford is frequently apparent. While it does so in an exceptionally powerful manner, "Ikiru" treats it's subject in a way that is more characteristic of Hollywood than of Ozuian cinema.

Were one to read a simple synopsis of the plot of "Ikiru", a bureaucrat in 1950s Tokyo discovers he is dying of stomach cancer, one would not be blamed for imagining the film as uncharacteristic of its director. It in no way deals with violence as do almost all of Kurosawa's period pieces and noirs. However, like Kurosawa's work in general, it approaches its seemingly simple story as a grandiose conflict in which the protagonist overcomes an obstacle to his goal. Indeed, without intending to give too much away, I think it is fair to call the film's protagonist a "hero" by the end. The film is unquestionably powerful and moving, profound even, but it achieves its effect by way of the emotionally manipulative machinations of western melodrama. Ozu's work, which often examines the everyday grievances of death and loss, does so with a stoically detached manner that makes his work, in my opinion, deeper than that of Kurosawa.

There is another way in which "Ikiru" is distinctly Kurosawaian, and that is one which is most particular to the director. As in "Rashoman" Kurosawa is boldly experimental in his manipulation of narrative time. Yet even this strikes me as very western. The non-linear telling of the story highlights the emotional impact of certain scenes in a way that is very operatic in a western sense. As I watched "Ikiru" it struck me that Kurosawa might be the single most important influence on the work of Quentin Tarantino.

Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989–1999)

nope

[8/10 · 8 May 2021]

This 8 part work was perhaps a transitional one for Godard. No major auteur has been as meta-cinematic as this director but in his late period, perhaps initiated here, he takes the self-reflecting nature of his medium to another level. Some works, such as this one, and his last film, "The Image Book" consist mostly of torrents of borrowed images that Godard confronts with his spoken musings. Philosophically, too, these "Histories" seem transitional. Godard appears here conflicted between the post-structuralist metaphysics of absence that characterizes his late work, in which film often seems like a memory of an event that never transpired, and the notion of cinema, put forth by Godard's theoretical mentor Andre Bazin, as having an indexical relationship to lived reality, a kind of presence-machine.

Humanity brought cinema into being, according to Godard's "history", to create an immortal image of life, an index of presence itself. But cinema is immortal in the same sense as a vampire. Being denied death, it comes to crave it. Arriving at the dawn of the twentieth century, the cinema came into being at the same time as technologies of mass destruction. Meant as an index of presence, it came to record the most massive waves of death humanity has ever encountered, as epitomized in the troves of footage the Nazis took of their own death camps as presented in Resnais's "Night and Fog", one of the films from which Godard here borrows the most. It is as if the moving image could only flourish in a reality of mechanized doom.

Godard, like Gilles Deleuze before him, sees Italian Neo-Realism as the turning point in the "life" of cinema. It was the Italians who were able to reassert a national identity in the aftermath of WWII, in the process creating what might be considered the first "national cinema"- cinema as a rearticulation, even a reinvention, of cultural identity.

In the last, most confessional, of these "histories", Godard says that being a filmmaker is, for him, a way of being both present and absent to the world. Any film, any work of art, is part of reality but also a protest against that very reality by offering an alternative to it. Godard expresses his, I believe sincere, gratitude for living in age, that of late capitalism, that so disgusts him, that inspires him so strongly to repudiate it. The final image is of the director's face, as if he is acknowledging himself the captive of the vampire, Cinema.

24 Frames (2017)

nope

[7/10 · 6 February 2020]

I find it puzzling that some critics found this last work by Abbas Kiarastam, made as he knew he was approaching the end of his days, disappointingly uncinematic. 24 Frames seems to me the logical end point for the arc of the career of one of the fundamentally cinematic artists. Surely, the Kiarastami aesthetic can best be boiled down to an Ozu style static camera mounted on a car window, a still, pensive acknowledgement of a world in flux.

Or perhaps one can see this work as an inversion of that aesthetic. For here, Kiarastami uses digital animation to bring movement to still images: a painting, a post-card, and 22 of his own still photographs, trying to inject temporality back into a "frozen moment". The movement comes mostly in the form of animal life, a nature that seems very much in peril. The few contributions by human characters are generally destructive, as if the humans think they live in frozen moments, a world that cannot end. Kiarastami seems to be trying to remind the viewer of the fragility of life in this world, how quickly we may be approaching it's end, as of course, he was approaching his as he made the film.

The Irishman (2019)

nope

[9/10 · 15 November 2019]

We all know that artists are prone to making art about the same thing over and over. Martin Scorsese is certainly prone to this. His latest film could be characterized as his second remake of his own film, Goodfellas. But whereas the first remake, Casino, simply felt like an inferior retread, The Irishman feels utterly different from the first two films, even though it seems to literally have many of the same scenes. It might be a better movie than Goodfellas, and that is saying a lot.

In a way, The Irishman feels like a disavowal of the earlier two gangster films, in which organized crime was depicted as a negation of the mundane and an attempt at transcendence. Here, gangsterism is the mundane par excellence. It is what makes society and history move forward, it IS the everyday reality. The main character, Robert De Niro's Frank Sheeran, doesn't aspire to criminality. He finds himself a hitman the way some people find themselves in any job- by sheer luck and an appropriate resume- four years of killing people in WWII. So, seemingly, do most of the characters we meet. They don't seem to have tried to get into this world, they are just in it, and don't question it's rules- one of which is a near guarantee of a violent death. In a very real sense, these are very passive people.

The one major exception is Jimmy Hoffa, played by Al Pacino. One of the ways this film is uncharacteristic for the director is that the traditional Scorsesean protagonist, they who assert their own, absolute law in the name of transcendence, is here a supporting character. And unlike most of Scorsese's other transcendentalist-characters, we of course know Hoffa is doomed from the start. This is by far Scorsese's saddest movie, of any genre. Indeed, if one were to try to describe what it is trying to evoke with one word it would probably be "regret." This film could probably only have been made by a bunch of old people. And Scorsese, De Niro, Pacino, and Joe Pesci, the film's third lead, are all in their 70s at this point.

De Niro has been phoning it in, at best, for years, maybe decades now. He sure makes a comeback here. This is one of his strongest performances ever, and possibly his single most vulnerable. I've rarely seen an actor convincingly convey so many different stages of a character's life. The film is so long we almost feel like we're aging with Sheeran, but that's not in any way a criticism. We come to feel the way that memory has salted the character's wounds.

Pesci gives a performance that noone could have thought him capable of. He's actually subtle, and utterly magnetic. His Russell Bufalino isn't an evil man, exactly. Murder has shaped his world from the start even more than it has those of the other characters.

On the other end of the spectrum, Pacino reveals that he can now only be Pacino. It's a good thing that in this context, his strutting, shouting-self works, because it's not really a performance, it's just schtick. I remember watching his films from the 1970s and thinking he was a good actor. He's always had presence to spare. I wonder now if he ever had anything else.

There is a sense in which this film's message is no less mundane than that everyone, regardless of the choices they make, will die one way or another, and that we all must face death, in the most ultimate sense, alone. But we must compare the way that the asserter-transcendentalist dies, unknowably but possibly without regret, with the very knowable, inevitable end of the rule followers. Perhaps Hoffa is marginal exactly because old Scorsese is finally throwing up the white flag in the quest for transcendence, he's acknowledging that it's probably always only been a myth, like Jimmy Hoffa has become. If that is what he is doing, then it is ironic that he does so in what might be his most transcendent work of art.

The Lighthouse (I) (2019)

nope

[8/10 · 13 November 2019]

This is a beautiful and haunting film. I was, nevertheless, slightly disappointed in the direction taken by filmmaker Robert Eggers in his sophomore feature. The first movie Eggers directed, The Witch, suggested an artist about to launch an extremely unique style. It is hard to call the aesthetics of The Lighthouse unique because they are an intentional hommage to an established master of the medium, the celebrated Hungarian auteur Bella Tarr.

This is not to say that the craftsmanship here is inferior to that displayed in The Witch, indeed it might be more impressive. For Eggers and his team do deliver a work fully worthy of Tarr, hardly an accomplishment to be scoffed at. Yet, specific shots and sequences are lifted from Tarr's work, especially The Turin Horse. This hardly seems a way for an emerging young talent to hone a unique style.

One can tell, however, that this came from the mind of the man behind The Witch, and not Tarr. Tarr's films are about humanity being overcome by our inner emptiness. Tarr's humanity is petulant, but mostly because it knows deep down inside that it amounts to nothing. Eggers's universe, on the other hand, is not empty. It is filled with an exceptionally sinister meaning. I can't think of a film that made baby eating seem as rich in metaphysical suggestion as did The Witch. You REALLY don't want to discover the secret meaning of Eggers's world in a dark alley.

There's a Promethean theme running through The Lighthouse that I didn't fully get. Indeed, the film is a bit heavy on symbolism for my taste. But both here and in The Witch the characters become vestibules for a divine chaos. In The Witch the messenger of this chaos is nature and repressed sexuality. In The Lighthouse it is alcohol. I don't know that any film I've seen has been as detailed a study of drunkenness, of the ways drink shatters the self, and in doing so sets it free to be the confused, paradoxical thing it is. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson do fine jobs of convincing the viewer they've had plenty of first hand experience.

Capernaum (2018)

nope

[9/10 · 6 October 2019]

This might be the most overwhelmingly powerful film I've ever seen about children. I was briefly overcome by it, which is unusual for me. With this tale of Zain, an existence-battered boy who sues his parents for the cruelty of giving him life, writer-director-actress Nadine Labaki has created a cinema-as-cry-of-anguish.

Labaki and DP Christopher Aoun depict contemporary Beirut as a beautiful, swirling hell in which humans, constantly afflicted by scarcity, turn to their most predatory instincts to survive one another's attacks. Seemingly only the most violent and pugnacious instincts can be nurtured in the world depicted in this film. And one senses no impulse towards social reform on the part of the filmmakers. No solution is offered or even suggested. This social order seems to be merely a reflection of the true nature of the human beast. It is surprising and unexplainable, then, that part of this nature is the impulse to care about one another (even if this does not translate into the ability to care for one another) and to, against the character's own stated wishes, remain alive.

The non-actor who is the lead performer, Zain Al Rafeea, a Syrian immigrant who has indeed grown up on the streets of Beirut, doesn't so much play the character as inhabit it. One senses that Labaki found someone who, as with Pierre Blaise as the titular character in Malle's "Lacombe, Lucien", actually was the character they were being asked to portray. The complete authenticity of Al Rafeea's behavior rescues the script from a potential problem. The misfortunes of the characters are so numerous and extreme that if the performances had any shade of artificiality the story might have started to seem ridiculous, like an out-of-control Thomas Hardy tale.

One finds oneself simultaneously wanting to look away from Zain because the suffering seems so legitimate, and unable to look away. Some morbidly curious part of ourselves wants to try to read in the child's face the horrors that he probably has, in fact, witnessed. When it comes time for Zain to denounce life itself, we sense that the words are coming from the performer as much as the character. This makes them both more piercing, and more cathartic.

Watching Capernaum, I found myself comparing it to two American films about harsh childhoods: the surprisingly gritty Hollywood adaptation Precious, and Sean Baker's spectacular indie, The Florida Project. I judge Capernaum to be clearly superior to the former and slightly inferior to the latter. Precious was ultimately, despite its bleak subject matter, a Hollywood film. Every scene was one of despair or hope, as if the two were mutually exclusive, with the resulting dialectic of course ultimately putting hope on top. Labaki does acknowledge moments of playfulness and empathy even in the hellish depths of her film's world. But her characters are totally at the mercy of the material reality around them. In that way, Capernaum is less complex than Baker's film, which subtly switches from the realist-objective to the expressionistic-subjective to show how the human imagination, despite all that besieges it, manages to create moments of beauty from the world around it. Labaki perhaps attempts such a thing in a scene where Zain finds himself in an amusement park, but this scene is the only false-note in the film. It comes off as a tired art-film cliche or a wholly unnecessary "hommage" to canonnical art films of the 1950s and 1960s.

I think this is a very fine work of art. I'm glad it was made and am happy I had the chance to see it. I am, however, sympathetic to those who might reject the film. For it dares to ask, "Is the ordeal of human existence worth while?" Given the conclusion it seems to me it undeniably arrives at, some might fairly say, "Better not to have asked the question."

Ganja & Hess (1973)

nope

[9/10 · 2 June 2019]

Terms such as "cult classic" or "cult masterpiece" are wildly over-used. However, "Ganja & Hess" might be one of the few films to fully deserve this designation. Given a contract to deliver a Blackspoitation-vampire movie, writer-director Bill Gunn instead delivered a unique, complexly philosophical work that of course disgusted its producers who then butchered the film. Known in its original form to only a few devotees for years, it was considered a lost classic. But a few years back New York's Museum of Modern Art heroically reconstructed the original version of the movie, and it is now available to the general public.

Gunn described his intentions as a desire to create a "Ingmar Bergman style symbolic movie." While I did not find it specifically Bergmanesque, this is a deeply spiritual work that seeks to confront conflicting ancestral cultural influences. Few works of cinema have been as deeply engaged in questions of African-American identity as this one. Gunn depicts African cultural influences as subtly informing the Judeo-Christian traditions that suppress the former in, from Gunn's perspective, Black American consciousness.

I can't think of another movie that's theme song is as central to its meaning as this one. The lyrics tell of a legend of cursed individuals in pre-colonial Africa that were addicted to blood. And "the blood of the thing is the truth of the thing." These cursed individuals were doomed to wander the earth forever with their addiction to truth until "the Christians came" and subjected the cursed to being "tortured by the cross", and thereby ending this addiction to truth.

The narrative follows a trio (or is it a quartet) of characters that lead or force each other on a spiritual journey. The first character to start on this path is George Medda, played by Gunn himself. Kneeling alone, the cross towering behind him as early Dixieland jazz plays in the background, Medda/Gunn addresses the (Black) audience. "To the Black male children, philosophy disregards the uncustomary things about you. Individual thought is applicable only to itself. There is a dreadful need in man to teach- this destroy the instinct to learn." It is surely the "teachings" of the colonizers that Medda/Gunn is referencing, the Enlightened maxim to find "freedom" by subjecting the self (and the other) to the dictates of (European) "reason" and ignoring all other drives. Medda's final statement to Black youth is that "Love is all there is and you are cannon fodder in its defense." It is with this that Medda ends his segment of the journey and initiates another into theirs: Hess Green, a wealthy Black intellectual who studies African culture from the perspective of a European outsider.

Previously, Medda and Green had engaged in a conversation in which Green said that pre-colonized African tribes that engaged in cannibalism did so not out of desire but cultural need. Whether the distinction between such needs and desires is a legitimate one is a recurring question of the film, for the line quickly blurs first for Green and then for his new lover, Ganja.

Hess studies various ancient documents and comes to the conclusion that the only way he can die is by "forces dangerous to the survival of love" that will send an implement to the bosom of the Creator and its creation, Hess, would then sleep forever. The implement of divine murder, Hess decides, is the Cross. He then turns towards the Black Church, which Gunn depicts as celebrating a Judeo-Christian deity in ways informed by pre-Colonial African traditions. Hess undergoes a religious conversion, and in doing so reenacts the experiences of his ancestors, and ends his addiction to truth. Seemingly blissful, he asks Ganja to join him besides (on?) the Cross, but she declines and leaves him to die alone.

The film's last scenes suggest an eternal return of the ancestral past, with the power of truth, and all of its destructive power, constantly reasserting itself in new forms.

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)

nope

[9/10 · 19 May 2019]

Yet another lushly alive work from Michael Powell and Emerick Pressburger. Thematically, it could be superficially compared to Austin's novel "Emma"- a young woman with a very set vision of her future finds that existence- the psychic, emotional self, is too chaotic to be predicted and planned. But there are many other dimensions to this movie. The film was made during the final gestations of WWII, and it is very much a work of its historical moment.

It starts off seeming like the Archers' entry into the late 1930s- early '40s genre of the Hollywood "screw ball" comedy. Indeed it does share certain characteristics with the works associated with that subgenre. Ultimately, however, I read this movie as a critique and rejection of the tenants of those Hollywood films.

As Stanley Cavell has detailed, the Hollywood screwball comedies were composed of conversations, the revealing of two selves to one another that ultimately resulted in the mutual decision to share a life- the intersubjective process of courtship. Cavell celebrates this aspect of the films, but what his readings overlook is that the screwball films invited the viewer to turn away from the world, as their beautiful protagonists did, and turn towards the psychological self and its inner fantasies and yearnings. The world at that moment, characterized first by global capitalist depression and then global military conflict, was one that the captains of industry were enthusiastic to make the working masses forget.

"I Know Where I'm Going" is very much a film-of-the-world, or rather A World: namely the island life of the Scottish Hebrides. The film's two main characters do not actually talk to each other much during the course of the film as much as they, and we, observe a society that the film documents. The fishing techniques, hobbies, songs, and myths of the islands' inhabitants are explored in an almost anthropological way, but with a tenderness and enthusiasm that is anything but scientific.

Few filmmakers ever conveyed love for the world as powerfully as the Archers, and this is one of their most impressive works in that regard. Their camera seems to caress the island locations, inviting us out of our preconceptions, away from ourselves, and towards the world, a world, at a particular time and place. When the characters find love, it is a manifestation of a love of life, not of self.

The work is not simply of its own time, its historical present. It also points to the immediate future. In its at times documentary like, on location cinematography and focus on the lives of common, working citizens, it points to what would in the immediately following years be the next great evolution of cinema: Italian Neo-Realism.

Night Catches Us (2010)

nope

[8/10 · 8 May 2019]

The only feature so far from writer-director Tanya Hamilton, this beautifully made, powerful film at times turns to conventional narrative tropes, but only because the moral predicaments it gropes with are so crushingly complex.

Set in 1976, as the pro-business establishment was reestablishing hegemony over both American political parties more trenchantly than they had since the Depression, this is a portrait of a post-revolutionary society in which the revolution, sadly, was defeated. The characters, former Black Panther militants, grapple with the aftermath of decisions made under impossibly wrenching circumstances.

Perhaps the film's ultimate theme is one of forgiveness, but not towards the established order that did and continues to torment oppressed nations. Rather, it promotes forgiveness towards the former comrades in arms that had to hurt one another just to strive to do good in a situation that could only have very bad results.

Shame (1968)

nope

[9/10 · 8 May 2019]

While not one of his most celebrated works, I would rank this in the top tier of Bergman's oeuvre. Perhaps it is somewhat overlooked because it is an acharacteristic film from this celebrated artist. This is the closest the director ever came to making an action film, or at least an action-driven movie, in which the lead characters' struggle to physically survive is the primary focus.

This might mark the high-water mark of Sven Nykvist's career as a cinematographer. It might sound strange, but the most memorable images here were, for me, his studies of blank walls off which the exhaustion and terror of the characters seemed to reflect. I have to think this film in particular influenced the look of Bela Tarr's black and white films from Damnation on. The hand held shots are also made all the more impressive by the fact that some of them are choreographed around pyrotechnics that, I would imagine, were not easily repeatable.

With the coldness with which the filmmakers abandon their characters to sinister forces, I wondered if Shame wasn't an inspiration for the heartless world of Michael Hanake. The particularly cruel, though also perhaps most human, final scenes are especially resonant in our contemporary moment in history, especially in relation to the NATO created humanitarian disaster in Libya.

Peterloo (2018)

nope

[8/10 · 19 April 2019]

For an avowed and outspoken Marxist, Mike Leigh has always kept the politics of his movies subtle and understated... until now. With his highest budget film ever, Leigh, now in his mid-70s, allows himself one long and fiery tangent against all things reactionary. The film would be about as subtle and relativist in its politics had it been made by a young Sergei Eisenstein. That's not to say it's not damn good, because in most respects it is.

Another way that Leigh and long-time DP collaborator Dick Pope have until recently been subtle and understated is in visual style. Their last film, Mr. Turner, broke with that habit and offered a nineteenth-century England that looked a whole lot like it had been painted by J.M.W. Turner. It was a gorgeous movie to look at, but it's modeling on the painter's work seemed a visual gimmick rather than a style. With Peterloo, Leigh and Pope offer a fully personal visual mastery of the medium. The British landscape has rarely as ever looked so Arcadian on the screen, this despite the fact that this is a gritty tale of difficult, impoverished lives. Performers are blocked within that landscape in ways that subtly suggest their capture by the historical forces around them. If Soviet silent cinema offered a Marxist aesthetic of montage, then this is Marxist mise-en-scene.

Peterloo is also an interesting experiment in cinema as not simply historical narrative but historical excavation and reenactment. Leigh researched the minutes of early nineteenth century political meetings of the British poor demanding democratic reform. Much of the film is composed of word for word recitals of these dictations. This certainly give the scenes a sense of authenticity. But because Leigh refuses to edit or exorcise anything, the reenactment scenes sometimes drag on and become a tad boring.

There are a few times when the transition from the historical speeches to the collectively constructed characterizations and dialogue is a bit clumsy, but mostly Leigh and his cast create believable, human characters from these now largely forgotten names.

The only really false notes in the movie are those that deal with the "wicked" aristocracy. Leigh's class hatred is such that he cannot even bring himself to depict the members of the oppressing class as humans but rather only as grotesque clowns. The viewer feels as if they have stumbled from tasteful historical epic to Three Stooges slapstick.