Review: The Beast

Image courtesy of Janus Films.

Henry James' 1903 short story "The Beast in the Jungle" features a character who tells a friend that he lives in constant fear of an unknown catastrophe that he believes will upend his life. It is not the beast that paralyzes him, but rather his fear of it. Fear itself may not be the only thing that the characters in director Bertrand Bonello's mesmerizing new film, "The Beast," may have to fear, as plenty of catastrophes befall the two lead characters during three different time periods. But fear has undoubtedly immobilized them.

Using James' concept - but certainly not the story itself - as a jumping-off point, Bonello's film is a surreal, unsettling, and visually and conceptually dazzling story about two people's inability to connect over a period of about 130 years. The two characters are played by Lea Seydoux and George MacKay, and the nature of their relationships in the various time periods vacillates greatly.

But first, the film opens on what appears to be Bonello himself directing Seydoux, possibly playing herself. She stands in front of a green screen and the director tells her to imagine something that has paralyzed her with fear. Seydoux lets out a bloodcurdling scream and she suddenly breaks up into thousands of pixels as we fade into the first of the three stories.

One story in particular - set in 2044 - acts as the framing device, in which we start and gradually come back to every once in a while. In that story, AI has seemingly taken over after humanity nearly destroyed itself with a catastrophic war. Seydoux's character in this story is in the middle of a process during which AI helps her undergo a "DNA purge," which removes negative memories of the past or even, in this case, past lives. Hence, the two different time periods of previous lives in which Seydoux's character seemingly existed as different people.

The first time period is 1910 during the Paris floods. Seydoux plays the unhappy wife of a doll manufacturer - once again giving Bonello the ability to play around with one of his favorite visual motifs: dolls and mannequins - who gets involved in what is at least an emotional affair - if not more - with an Englishman (MacKay). The film's first hour operates at a measured pace as these two begin to see more of each other. The story culminates in a tragedy during a fire at the doll factory during which the pair must flee by swimming through a flooded basement, a visually stunning sequence that features dolls floating by as the pair try to find an escape route.

A creepy talking doll pops up in the second story, which is set in Los Angeles in 2014, where Seydoux is an aspiring actress/model who is house sitting for a rich person in the Hollywood hills. At night, she goes out alone to nightclubs, which are the most eerily shot sequences at such places in recent memory. There's some beautiful nighttime photography in this sequence as Gabrielle (Seydoux) drives alone down the Sunset Strip and haunting overhead shots of the city go a long way in creating atmosphere.

In the first story, Seydoux went to see a medium to talk about her paralyzing fear, and was told that a pigeon entering her home could be seen as a bad omen. Sure enough, not only does one enter her home in 1910, but it also attacks her. In 2014, the bird makes an appearance and its brutalized carcass is later found in the driveway. 

In the 2014 story, Gabrielle enlists the help of an online psychic, an unsettling woman who appears to think something bad is heading Gabrielle's way. Sure enough, that bad thing is MacKay's Louis Lewansky, a 30-year-old incel who hates women because of his belief that they never give him a chance. He has taken to stalking Gabrielle throughout L.A., often parking his car and sitting on the lawn outside her home.

If the film's first hour is intentionally languid, its second is unbearably intense. Bonello makes great use of Los Angeles as a noir epicenter. The neon-tinted nighttime scenes are frighteningly dreamy and there's a long sequence toward this story's end in which Gabrielle believes an intruder is in the house that is among the scariest scenes I've seen in some time.

Bonello has long been a director of surreal arthouse thrillers such as "Zombi Child" and "Nocturama," and he doesn't attempt to hide his influences in "The Beast." These include everything from giallos and "Titanic" to, naturally, David Lynch. The 2014 story draws some obvious inspiration from Lynch's masterpiece "Mulholland Drive," from its portrayal of Los Angeles as a terrifying dreamscape to a scene in which Gabrielle obsessively watches a TV karaoke show in which someone lip syncs to Roy Orbison's "Evergreen."

Beyond that, "The Beast" is Lynchian in that rather concerning itself too much with the details of plot, it often feels as if it's following dream logic, and there's a free-floating atmosphere of doom throughout the film that reminded me of other L.A.-set Lynch films, namely "Lost Highway" and "Inland Empire." A scene toward the end is set at a bar that gave off "Twin Peaks" vibes and the film's culmination might have been inspired by that TV show's third season finale.

It's during the final sequence - in which we're back in 2044 - that Seydoux's character again speaks with the latest iteration of MacKay's character. He broaches the subject of their love - in the present as well as in past lives - and it results in Seydoux letting out a bloodcurdling scream similar to the one at the beginning in front of the green screen. Is it love itself that's the subject of her foreboding? Is the beast simply living in fear of truly connecting with someone else - or rather, being unable to connect?

"There must be beautiful things in this chaos," says Gabrielle to her stalker. But can we recognize these beautiful things if we live paralyzed by fear, something that seems all too real in 2024 and beyond as we possibly face a future similar to that depicted in the film's 2044 section, where AI requires that mankind blot out all that is human? I'm not sure "The Beast" is a film that can be - or is even meant to be - truly comprehended. Regardless, it's the first great movie of the year.

Review: Civil War

Image courtesy of 

Alex Garland's brutal and intense "Civil War" is a film that deserves praise for its accomplished filmmaking techniques, but left me a bit perplexed due to its lack of context or perspective. It's a well-made movie that wants to have it both ways by stoking the fire but hoping that the flames don't get out of control. 

The film is filled with footage of bloody carnage depicting Americans carrying out violent acts against one another over politics, but it doesn't explain how the fictional version of the nation got to this point and it provides little way in the way of commentary, which in our current moment feels like a missed opportunity.

That being said, there's still a fair amount to praise. It's well shot and the cast - which includes Kirsten Dunst as a seasoned photographer, Stephen McKinley Henderson as her mentor, Cailee Spaeny as a novice photographer, Wagner Moura as a thrill-seeking reporter, Jesse Plemons in a chilling turn as a murderous member of one side of the conflict, and Nick Offerman as an imperial president - is uniformly solid.

The film opens with a riot that turns deadly in New York City, where Dunst's Lee and Moura's Joel are planning a road trip to Washington D.C., where they hope to get an interview with Offerman's president before he's assassinated by an insurrectionist group comprised of the states of California and Texas - a plot element that could only exist in a movie and, in this case, one made by an Englishman - that is moving in on the capitol. Henderson's Sammy is a veteran New York Times reporter who tags along for the ride, while Spaeny's wide-eyed and occasionally callous aspiring photographer Jessie begs for Lee, one of her heroes, to let her come along as well.

It's honorable that the film wants to pay homage to journalists - and their adventures reminded me of old-school journalism thrillers set in war zones, such as "The Year of Living Dangerously" or "Salvador" - but it also ironically makes the mistake that so many print and broadcast journalism outlets have made in recent years: engaging in both sides-ism under the guise of being fair and balanced. 

The film does this by having no mentions of politics or religion - which I found to be an odd choice - but also giving each side traits that could be found in our modern political landscape. Offerman's president is Trumpian in that he has refused to leave office after his second term, while the insurrection looking to oust him is, well, you know. There's no mention of how the country got to this point.

So, while I was impressed by the film's technical feats - the sequence with Plemons' fascistic soldier is the film's most frightening, while the final raid on the White House is handled expertly - the film wants to have it both ways, most likely to sell the most tickets. 

It's an odd conundrum: On the one hand, while I can recommend the picture as a skillfully made dystopian thriller, I also found it odd that a film on this subject in the year 2024 would have no political opinion on the matter. And the few tidbits that are included - video footage from far-right influencer Andy Ngo and a reference to the "Antifa Massacre," which felt like a loaded expression - only further muddy the waters.

Garland previously wrote the screenplay for Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later," another fraught film about societal collapse that is among my favorite horror movies of the 21st century. That film left nothing wanting, whereas "Civil War," while effective as a genre film, feels incomplete. It's worth seeing, but all of the technical prowess on display felt a little like empty calories.

Review: The First Omen

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

"The First Omen" is a horror prequel that nobody probably thought they needed, but it's a surprisingly gripping - especially considering that we know how it turns out - and often frightening (and occasionally disreputable, which in this case isn't a critique) prelude to Richard Donner's 1976 horror classic. It has breathed new life into a horror series that hasn't had an outright good entry since the original.

The film is set in 1971 Rome, and director Arkasha Stevenson from the start creates a creepy vibe, from a sweaty discotheque where two soon-to-be nuns go out for a night on the town to overhead shots of the city that fill the viewer with dread every time they appear.

As the film opens, Margaret Daino (Nell Tiger Free) has just arrived in Rome, where she is to work at an orphanage prior to taking her vows. She has been brought there by a Catholic bishop with some power (Bill Nighy), and it's clear from the start that Margaret has a checkered history. Growing up an orphan, she bounced from place to place and was somewhat, we learn, of a problem child. The visions that plagued her in childhood occasionally pop up to provide a jump scare or two.

A roommate, Luz (Maria Caballero), takes her out to the aforementioned nightclub, where the two women meet some men and have a few drinks. The next day, Margaret can't remember what happened the night before and as she awakens a small spider seems to crawl out of her eye. Ick!

Things at the orphanage seem odd, to say the least, especially the treatment of a problem child named Carlita (Nicole Sorace). The nuns at the orphanage tell Margaret to stay away from Carlita and even lock her up on occasion in a place known as the bad room.

Margaret meets an excommunicated priest (Ralph Ineson) who tells her of a nefarious plan involving a group of powerful church officials. With belief in God on the decline - and, therefore, power in the church's hands dwindling - this group has concocted a scheme to help birth the antichrist with the intention of controlling him, which they believe will draw believers back to the church out of fear.

A plot twist occurs late in the film regarding who the birth mother of the antichrist will be, although it's pretty easy to see coming. Not so easy to predict is the gruesome birth ceremony involving a Caesarean section operation late in the film, which follows a series of gruesome deaths throughout the picture - the effect of a piece of glass on a head, an act of self-immolation, and a traffic accident that is particularly grotesque.

"The First Omen" is what one might call a blasphemous good time. The picture is occasionally outrageous, pretty spooky, and atmospheric - naturally, its Italian setting is utilized for giallo-esque touches (the nightclub especially). I may not have thought another "Omen" film - prequel or otherwise - was necessary at this point, but "The First Omen" is a surprisingly effective one.

Review: Monkey Man

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Dev Patel's ultra-violent and semi-mystical "Monkey Man" is a "John Wick" type of action film set in modern day India to the extent that when the lead character, played by Patel, finds a dog to feed in an alley, I briefly wondered if the pup would be killed, thereby sending Patel's unnamed fighter on a killing rampage.

The dog goes unscathed, which is more than can be said for virtually everyone else in the picture. The film is inspired by the legend of Hanuman, which I won't recap here, but suffice it to say that Patel's character bears some similarity to that legend in that he's a kid from the slums who rises up to challenge the elites.

As the film opens, he is getting paid to lose fights in boxing matches at the behest of a sleazy promoter played by Sharlto Copley, who gets so into his role that saliva often flies from his mouth whilst speaking. In the ring, Patel's "Kid" - as he's known in the credits - wears a monkey mask and is good at taking a punch and a fall. As it turns out, he actually can fight.

Some years before, the Kid watched his mother get murdered by a corrupt police chief (Sikandar Kher) and intends to exact revenge on him as well as the sinister guru (Makarand Deshpande) who is to blame for the death as he was ordering the city's poor to be ordered off their land to make way for a factory. A question that occurred to me while watching the film: Is it typical for a yoga-practicing spiritual guru to be running a factory? 

Regardless, the Kid puts himself in proximity of these corrupt figures by working at a restaurant run by the foul-mouthed and mean spirited Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar) where the baddies tend to flock. The film's final prolonged fight sequence - which utilizes all manner of kitchen utensils and pots and pans - is set in this restaurant, where the leaders of the Sovereign Party - a MAGA-type group that oppresses the city's trans inhabitants, Muslims, and the poor - are holding a pre-election banquet.

For a first time director, Patel does a decent job at crafting a tense and kinetic action picture. That being said, it's not without its flaws. The fight scenes have a near-frantic nature and there are multiple scenes in which the Kid is fleeing from crowds of villains. The camera work is herky jerky almost to the point where it's difficult to see who's doing what. Also, while the film has a mythologizing element, from its use of the Hanuman legend to the mysteries surrounding the Kid's personality and background, we learn little other than that his mother was wronged and that he's pretty pissed off.

As a result, "Monkey Man" isn't quite on the level of some of the films it's mimicking - namely, the "John Wick" movies - but it's better than some other obvious influences (the overrated "The Raid" pictures). Patel is a fine actor and has talent behind the camera, but I'm hoping next time he tackles something that feels a little less like a mishmash of influences from other genre movies.

Review: Late Night With The Devil

Image courtesy of IFC Films.

The low-budget horror movie throwback "Late Night with the Devil" is three-quarters of a decent piece of schlock that overstays its welcome and, ultimately, ends on a note that isn't altogether satisfying. That said, this is a gimmick movie that remains compelling and has an ever-present tension that is impressively maintained for most of its running time. 

The gimmick here is that the film's story unfolds in real time during the taping of a 1977 episode of a late night talk show featuring a host who has long dreamed of making it to the big time, but that goal has always been just out of reach. The film is in color during the scenes that are live on the air and in black and white during commercial breaks as the show's crew works behind the scenes.

We get a bit of back story upfront: Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) is a rival to Johnny Carson in the 1970s but his late-night show, "Night Owls," never poses a real threat to Carson's numbers. His viewership begin to lag and his wife develops cancer, which ultimately claims her life. 

Desperate to ensure that his show survives, Delroy plans a Halloween special that is stocked with kooky characters - a psychic named Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) who gets a disturbingly strong reading from someone in the crowd, a debunker named Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss) who agrees to be on the show to explain how all of the other guests are scammers, a parapsychologist named Dr. June (Laura Gordon) who appears to be having an affair with Delroy, and her subject, a young girl named Lily (Ingrid Torelli), the only survivor of a cult's mass suicide who is alleged to be possessed by a demonic entity known as Abraxas.

To his credit, Dastmalchian is believable as the smarmy talk show host who remains on as long as the cameras are running and appears to be scheming whenever they're not. One of the film's flaws is an allusion to his possible dealings with a cult-like celebrity group that never is explained enough to be interesting or provide any insight into Delroy's character. 

The film plays like a found footage film, albeit one shot with professional cameras in front of a live audience, rather than the grainy digital types to which we've become accustomed. Much of the film involves playing to expectations - for example, Christou's bad vibes he gets in the audience obviously portend something sinister to come. There is also one prominent red herring in the film involving an audience member.

Once the focus is on Dr. June and Lily, the film takes on a much creepier tone. There's nothing here you haven't seen before in countless exorcism films, but the culmination of the demon within Lily being pestered is more sturm und drang than I was expecting. Had the film ended there, "Late Night with the Devil" might have been a tighter picture. But it continues on after the Lily melee and, as a result, it's a weaker film for it.

Even if "Late Night" doesn't quite stick the landing, there are a number of things it gets right. As mentioned, Dastmalchian does a good job with this character, even if Delroy isn't developed as much as one might have liked. The film also gets the vibe of the era, even if some of the antics on the show aren't, perhaps, in line with late night talk shows of that time period. Although far from perfect, "Late Night with the Devil" is an often amusing and brief horror movie that fans of the genre will likely want to seek out.

Review: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.

As far as nostalgia-heavy sequels that bank upon the fond memories of their audiences to rake in more money go, you could do far worse than "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire," yet another attempt to cash in on the 1984 comedy classic. The film is, of course, nowhere near as good as Ivan Reitman's original picture, but as far as these things go, there's some moderate fun to be had here.

The Spengler family - who are thankfully no longer being visited by a digitally-recreated Harold Ramis - has moved from Oklahoma to New York City, where they've taken over the firehouse that serves as Ghostbusters headquarters. They continue to catch unruly spirits, but have found themselves on the wrong side of the mayor (William Atherton, whose character has gone from the condescending EPA agent to the cranky top official of New York City).

Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) finds herself booted off the team after the mayor points out that she's underage, so she's left to her own devices, which leads to her befriending a ghost (Emily Alyn Lind) who is stuck in purgatory. Without giving too much away, their friendship leads to a dangerous artifact handed to Dan Aykroyd's Ray Stantz by a character portrayed by Kumail Nanjiani - whose family was tasked with being "fire masters" to prevent an ancient demon from rising and turning everything in its path into ice - releasing the demon on the city.

It is up to the Spengler family and the older Ghostbusters (Ernie Hudson returns as Zeddemore, Annie Potts is back as sarcastic Janine, and Bill Murray has a few walk-on scenes as Venkman) to prevent the demon from releasing the thousands of ghosts that the Ghostbusters have stored in the firehouse's wall over the years and creating an undead army.

One of the problems with "Frozen Empire" is that there are too many subplots - Phoebe's friendship with the ghost could have used more screen time, while the thread involving Nanjiani's relatives could have used less, despite the actor providing many of the film's funnier quips - and entirely too many secondary characters.

On the other hand, there are a number of MVPs in this film - Rudd provides some laughs and pathos as Gary, Phoebe's science teacher who is now involved with Carrie Coons' Callie Spengler; Grace shines as Phoebe; Nanjiani is pretty funny; Patton Oswalt has a solid cameo, and Aykroyd gets the most to do of the legacy cast.

Trotting out new "Ghostbusters" sequels every so often isn't really necessary, although it's more watchable than many of the other franchises that return to the well again and again. The original 1984 film is by far the best of the bunch, the 2016 reboot was better than most people gave it credit for at the time, and all of the other sequels have been varying shades of not bad. 

This fifth entry doesn't lay into the nostalgia factor nearly as hard as the one before it, but there are still a number of call-backs - Slimer makes an appearance and there's a mini army of marshmallow men. The film doesn't really do anything new and its plot involving the demon being unleashed on the world is fairly substandard. But the film also asks us to spend time with a group of talented and likable people, and that's what makes this expensive-looking blockbuster occasionally work. As I said, you could do far worse.

Review: Love Lies Bleeding

Image courtesy of A24.

Being well made isn't necessarily the same thing as being good, and that's a distinction with which I had to wrestle when considering my feelings toward Rose Glass's "Love Lies Bleeding," a well-made movie that I admired a little more than I liked. In the end, I'd say that I could recommend the movie, which has much going for it, even if the experience of watching it wasn't always particularly pleasant.

The film is set in the late 1980s in a remote New Mexico town, where we first meet gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) cleaning out the nastiest cinematic toilet since "Trainspotting." It's the first of many messes she'll find herself cleaning during the course of the picture and only the first example of a scene in the film that nearly set my gag reflex in motion.

Lou meets and quickly becomes enamored with Jackie (Katy O'Brian), a newcomer to town from Oklahoma who's passing through on her way to Las Vegas, where she intends to take part in a bodybuilding competition. Jackie is jacked, partly due to her rigorous workout schedule, but also because of the steroids with which she's pumping herself. "Love Lies Bleeding" has the most evocative sound design since the recent "The Zone of Interest," in that every muscle flex or vein popping - not to mention some squishing while dealing with corpses - is reflected nauseatingly on the soundtrack.

Lou has a background that only slowly reveals itself to Jackie, who gets a job at a local gun range, which is run by the creepy Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), Lou's father, who is a local criminal extraordinaire, and whose wife's disappearance is never really explained - but, well, you can probably guess. Lou is troubled that her sister (Jena Malone) is abused by her ne'er-do-well husband JJ (Dave Franco, whose mullet is only the second worst haircut in the picture after Harris' insanely bad one), and Jackie takes note of this.

Soon, Lou and Jackie strike up a relationship, Jackie moves in, and some semi-explicit sex scenes ensue. Meanwhile, JJ takes it one step too far one night and - not to spoil anything here, but... - Jackie takes matters into her own hands, leading to another gag reflex-triggering moment. This leads to a downward spiral involving the police, another young woman who engages in sexual blackmail with Lou after witnessing her and Jackie driving JJ's car in the middle of the night, and Jackie's bodybuilding contest freakout in Las Vegas.

Glass's first film, "Saint Maud," was a religious-themed thriller that sometimes felt like a body horror movie. "Love Lies Bleeding" falls into that same category. Anyone who ever might have thought of using steroids will likely take a pass after watching this picture. Jackie's muscles flex to the point where they seem they might burst at any given moment, and her clear case of roid-rage is outright scary.

The film's eerie nighttime shots and electronic score, blended with its neo-noir trappings and neon-lit atmosphere, reminded me slightly of Nicolas Winding Refn's "Drive," although the film that seems to have inspired much of "Love Lies Bleeding" is David Lynch's freaky "Lost Highway," from the nighttime shots of the highway flying by in the darkness, the creepy scenes in the desert, and even a gruesome death-by-table sequence that feels like a shoutout to the one in Lynch's film.

There's also a similarity to Lynch's film - in which one character literally becomes another halfway through the picture - in that character's pasts and true selves are hidden within the shadows of the night, during which much of Glass's film is set.

So, while "Love Lies Bleeding" isn't a film that's always enjoyable in the traditional sense - it's grim, grimy, and occasionally visually unpleasant - it's a film with much to admire, from the performances (Stewart's Lou is tightly coiled, while O'Brian is outright explosive and Harris is the scariest I've ever seen him) to its stylish visuals and dark sense of humor. One's enjoyment might be determined by how much one can relate to characters whose behavior often veers into the sociopathic and how much one's stomach can take by the grotesque imagery, but "Love Lies Bleeding" is, if nothing else, memorable.

Review: About Dry Grasses

Image courtesy of Janus Films.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films are frequently long - his latest being well over three hours - and talkative dramas that examine weighty subject matter - such as good and wrongdoing (in his Palm d'Or winner "Winter Sleep") or the nature of truth (his 2012 masterpiece "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia") - through conversation.

In his latest, "About Dry Grasses," Ceylan asks us to spend more than three hours in the company of a man who is, let's face it, unpleasant and often unlikable. Thankfully, great drama does not require feeling sympathetic towards a fictional character.

The film's lead character is art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), who has been assigned to work in a remote location in east Turkey, despite wanting to live in a more metropolitan area such as Istanbul, and who wears a condescending smirk on his face most of the time. He's equally friendly with the Turkish regime - he cavorts with local military men - and the opposition, namely a left-wing woman named Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a former military woman who lost a leg in a bomb blast, whom he befriends later in the film. It is she who calls Samet out and points out the zone of moral cowardice he inhabits that involves approving when a good thing gets done, but acting as if he wants nothing to do with politics.

A conundrum involving Samet, Nuray, and Kenan (Musab Ekici), Samet's roommate and closest thing to a best friend, arises late in the picture, but an earlier bit of drama dominates the film's first half. Samet shows outsized favorable attention to a girl named Sevim (Ece Bagci) whom he believes is smarter than the other students, whom he often berates cruelly. There's nothing to suggest that Samet has done anything to overtly cause harm to this girl, but he still crosses a line.

There's a scene early in the film in which the question of lying or telling the truth - and whether it's necessary to always tell the truth when feelings are involved - is discussed among some teachers in a faculty lounge in regard to a merchant who was selling fake goods. Samet believes that one must always tell things the way they are - people's feelings be damned - and this is obvious during a particularly unkind moment when he criticizes his students and tells them they'll likely not rise above their humble existences and during another scene in which Nuray asks Samet not to tell Kenan, who obviously likes her, about a night they spent together, which Samet goes out and immediately does afterward.

The most fascinating sequence in the picture is a long, dialogue-driven scene when Nuray invites Samet and Kenan over the dinner and, for once, the former lies and fails to mention it to the latter. This is the night that will end with them sleeping together, but first the two debate politics or, rather, whether one should become involved in community advocacy. Nuray calls Samet out over his selfishness and lack of interest in getting involved in the world, arguing that he hides behind a mask of faux politeness when, in fact, he doesn't want to admit that he cares for no one other than himself.

One of the film's ironic touches are the photographs that Samet takes of the town's inhabitants in the form of tableaux vivants, which appear lovingly shot; however, it's clear that Samet cares little about the subjects in the photos and thinks of most of the people in the town as uneducated and simple. 

There's also a perplexing moment late in the picture - and immediately before Samet and Nuray sleep together - that I won't give away, but it's something akin to breaking the fourth wall. It's as if to suggest that amid all this back and forth about the nature of lies versus truth, we shouldn't forget that the entire production - a film in which actors are portraying people other than themselves - is itself a lie.

Ceylan's finest film, in my book, remains the mesmerizing "Anatolia," but "About Dry Grasses" is another strong and often fascinating look at what truth actually means, and how it should be wielded. For moviegoers of the patient variety, this film will likely cast a spell.

Review: How To Have Sex

Image courtesy of Imagine Film Distribution.

The British coming-of-age story "How to Have Sex" depicts modern teenage rites of passage - especially for young women - as a slow-motion horror show. The film begins as a story about a group of three British girls on holiday on the Greek islands and is replete with the requisite party-til-you-drop type of bacchanalia that you'd expect in any American entry in this subgenre from the past however many decades.

But a little less than halfway through the film - during a part when the girls attend a party at a nightclub where the sleazy MCs corral young men onto a stage and ask girls to do their best to make them hard - the film becomes something else entirely. Even though the boozy early scenes didn't exactly strike me as fun as they did their participants, the latter scenes take on an unambiguously unsettling air.

Tara is the lead character. Portrayed by a very good Mia McKenna Bruce, she is smaller in stature than her two friends - caring Em (Enva Lewis) and passive aggressive Skye (Lara Peake) - and displays a naivete in terms of who she trusts. Tara is a virgin, driven home by the "Angel" necklace around her neck with which she's frequently toying.

The girls meet another group rooming across the way from them. This trio consists of amiable Badger (Shaun Thomas), a heavily tattooed boy who obviously takes a shine toward Tara, as well as Paige (Laura Ambler), the film's most underdeveloped character who becomes a romantic interest for Em, and Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), an arrogant womanizer whom Tara makes the mistake of trusting.

In terms of setup and plot, "How to Have Sex" might seem simplistic. The three young women arrive at their exotic outpost, party quite a bit, meet the boys (and girl) next door, and party some more until things take a darker turn when a sexual encounter - in fact, more than one - raises questions regarding consent and a character appears stuck in a scenario that becomes increasingly tense.

The film's visual style remains interesting throughout. At first, the nighttime scenes have a hypnotic quality as the nightclubs visited by Tara, Em, and Skye are lit with glowing strobe lights. The daytime scenes show things in a bleaker, light-of-day manner, that is, until the switch in tone halfway through the picture. At that point, the nighttime - during which the characters drink heavily - takes on a more sinister tone, while the daylight offers a little reprieve.

"How to Have Sex" may not reinvent the wheel on the coming-of-age story, but it's a solid depiction of a young woman learning who she can lean on and who to avoid, while also portraying an unsettling initiation into the sexual rites of passage. Overall, this is a solid debut.

Review: Dune: Part Two

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Director Denis Villeneuve raised some eyebrows recently when he made a comment that he primarily emphasizes the visual component of cinema and that, to paraphrase, dialogue doesn't interest him very much. He later retracted the statement, but the irony of it is that while I was watching the expensive-looking - and often visually impressive - "Dune: Part Two," I found the picture's numerous set pieces to be mostly engaging whereas the quieter moments in which the characters talk, mostly about whether Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) is a messiah figure, were less interesting.

Overall, this second film - both pictures are based on Frank Herbert's cult science fiction novel of the same name, and a third film based on "Dune Messiah" is sure to follow - is a pretty decent blockbuster film. It's about as good as the first film, which was a movie that I admired a little more than I liked. 

It's a well made film that is rich with visual detail, although the super serious discussions of messianic prophecies and a spice that rules the galaxy can be a little on the silly side, something that David Lynch recognized when making his much-maligned 1984 version of the film, to which time has been kinder than one might expect.

It's ironic also that the two films in Villeneuve's oeuvre that impressed me the most were ones that were dialogue-driven - the gripping thriller "Prisoners" and the bizarre and surreal "Enemy." I've admired his "Blade Runner" sequel, "Arrival," and the "Dune" films, but they honestly don't affect me as much as the aforementioned.

The second "Dune" movie picks up where the first left off - Atreides is in the desert with the Fremen, whom Paul will eventually inspire to take up arms against the emperor (Christopher Walken), his daughter (Florence Pugh), the sinister Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Sarsgard), and his sociopathic nephew, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), who is this film's central villain.

Any further explanation of the plot would take up space that I'm not willing to fill and you're probably not willing to read. Needless to say, Atreides' possible messiah stature is questioned and tested - there's a great scene in which he rides one of those gigantic sand worms - and a romance buds between him and Chani (Zendaya), although this is one of the film's more undercooked subplots.

As I mentioned, there are some great set pieces - the sand worm ride, a sequence during which Paul and Chani lead a group to attack a large machine that digs up the spice and must hide in its shadows to avoid being shot, and a final battle that culminates with a fight between Feyd-Rautha and Atreides. The film leaves many plot threads open, which I'm guessing will be addressed when "Dune Messiah" inevitably gets made.

In the meantime, "Dune: Part Two" is a good example of a solid big budget studio property that isn't dumbed down for audiences and doesn't cater to the needs of all who attend. In other words, you're either a fan of this thing or you're not - those who liked the first entry will probably feel the same way about this one. This was my reaction as well. I liked the first "Dune," even if I didn't quite love it, and that's about where I stand with this second film.

Review: Perfect Days

Image courtesy of The Match Factory.

Wim Wenders' "Perfect Days" might seem to some to have an ironic title. The film is, after all, about a toilet cleaner who spends his days mostly engaging in the quotidian and sticking to an orderly schedule. And yet, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) seems to relish the beauty he spots around him, sometimes in odd places - a game of Tic Tac Toe in one of the bathrooms that he cleans or the lovely, swaying Tokyo trees that he occasionally photographs.

People seem to mostly ignore Hirayama, as evidenced by the man nursing a hangover who knocks over his sign alerting bathroom users that the floor might be slippery and doesn't stop to apologize or pick it up, or the woman who willfully seems to not recognize his presence after he finds her lost child in a bathroom stall.

Some people might say Hirayama is living a life of resignation, but I'd say it's more one of acceptance. He takes his job seriously while cleaning the toilet stalls in upscale neighborhoods, and manages to be nice to his obnoxious co-worker (Tokio Emoto) and that guy's significantly more interesting girlfriend. 

All the while, Hirayama seemingly finds joy in the small everyday moments - listening to his cassette tapes (which populate the soundtrack with Lou Reed and Patti Smith songs) while he drives, observing people in the park, reading (William Faulkner and Patricia Highsmith are among the books he pores over in his semi-dark apartment), and eating night after night at the same restaurant, where the female proprietor knows what he wants before he's even able to order.

But is Hirayama hiding something? Is his situation a sort of forced penance? His dreams in black and white provide only slight glimpses, giving the impression that there's something on his mind, but there's not enough there for any definitive answers. His routine is broken up by the appearance of a runaway niece (Arisa Nakano), whose presence he obviously enjoys, but when his sister pulls up in a car with a driver up to pick up the girl after a day or so, she seems surprised that he is cleaning toilets for a living. In a final shot in which Hirayama drives his car listening to Nina Simone, he appears to vacillate between smiling and just the faintest hint of tears in his eyes. 

However, anything else in Hirayama's life other than what we see is simply to be inferred by the audience. There's a scene that stuck with me during which Hirayama is staring at a nondescript patch of earth that appears to be covered by some sort of bags. A man approaches and asks Hirayama if he recalls what used to be in the spot, hinting that it was something more attractive than what's currently occupying it. "That's what happens when you get old," the man retorts. Beautiful things fade and are occasionally replaced by ugly ones.

"Perfect Days" is Wenders' best film in a while and it's also one in a long line of works inspired by Japan. The director previously shot two documentaries in the country - "Notebook on Clothes and Cities" and "Tokyo Ga," which was directly inspired by Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu's work - also very present in the style of "Perfect Days" - and "Until the End of the World" included a section in that nation. 

In the 1980s, Wenders was one of the greatest working filmmakers, and his "Paris, Texas" and "Wings of Desire" are enduring masterpieces. Much like Werner Herzog, another member of the New German Cinema, Wenders has spent recent years making smaller independent films and documentaries. "Perfect Days" is his most potent in some time. This is a movie about living a life of simplicity that hints at much greater complexities. Yakusho gives an excellent leading performance and Wenders was smart to mostly center an entire movie around his day-to-day life. This movie is a small gem.

Review: Drive Away Dolls

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

Ethan Coen's first solo outing - following his brother Joel's first solo film three years ago, "The Tragedy of Macbeth" - is a raunchy road comedy that, perhaps, sheds some light on which Coen brother brings which sensibility to the duo's oeuvre. Based on what we've seen in the past few years, it stands to reason that Joel brings the brooding dark qualities, while Ethan is seemingly responsible for the kookier elements.

This is evidenced in "Drive Away Dolls," a film that follows two lesbian best pals, Jaime (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), who decide to rent a "drive-away" vehicle - in other words, one that you rent with the purpose of driving it to the location where the car rental business needs it to be delivered - to get to Tallahassee, where Marian aims to meet up with a relative for some birdwatching. Jaime is in the process of breaking up with her cop lover Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), so she decides to tag along.

However, before we meet the two young women, we see a man (Pedro Pascal) carrying a briefcase - which has contents that are kept secret for some time in the vein of "Pulp Fiction" and "Kiss Me Deadly," until they finalize emerge in one of the film's nuttier twists - who is caught in an alleyway and dispatched in a gruesome fashion.

The car that Jaime and Marian end up renting, unbeknownst to them, has this man's head in a cooler in the trunk along with the mysterious suitcase. As they make their way to Tallahassee, whose very existence appears to be the butt of a running joke in the film, a group of sinister men led by a character played by Colman Domingo are on their tail.

Without giving too much away, the contents of the suitcase are linked back to a conservative politician played by Matt Damon, whose character's ultimate fate - spelled out in a newspaper headline - makes for the film's best gag. Some of the film's other gags - a running joke involving numerous characters reading Henry James - are less successful.

In terms of tone, "Drive Away Dolls" is more in line with the Coens' wackier output, namely "Raising Arizona" or "Burn After Reading," although in terms of quality it's more on the level of "The Ladykillers" or "Intolerable Cruelty." In other words, it's a lesser Coen Brother(s) joint. But while it doesn't rank highly in the overall incredible body of work from the Coens - and Joel's "Macbeth" adaptation was easily the superior solo project - it's not without its pleasures.

"Drive Away Dolls" is good for some laughs, and Qualley and Viswanathan make for a likable leading pair. Qualley is the more abrasive and outrageous character, while Viswanathan is the more buttoned-up one. It's a tried-and-true formula for a buddy comedy, but that element works well enough. As opposed to some of the Coens' best work - "Fargo," "No Country for Old Men," or "A Serious Man," for example - this breezy 84-minute movie is skin deep in comparison. But overall, it's an amusing - and bawdy - trifle. 

Review: Bob Marley: One Love

Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

There's an introduction to "Bob Marley: One Love" during which Ziggy Marley, fellow musician and son of Bob, notes that the film you are about to see depicting his father's life is authentic. While this may be the case and the filmmakers deserve credit for trying to capture the essence of their subject, authenticity does not necessarily make for a successful biopic.

So, while the film - directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green ("King Richard") - appears to accurately aim to capture the manner in which Bob; his wife, Rita (Lashana Lynch); and his fellow Wailers speak (in other words, there's no attempt to Anglicize the patois) and it's full of great music, there's something missing here. At the risk of a dumb joke, let's say the filmmakers fail to catch a fire.

The problem is not in the casting. As the titular musical legend, Kingsley Ben-Adir turns in a convincing performance, while Lynch is solid as Rita, although her character drops in and out of the action and is often used as a plot device for Bob - for example, when she's shot the band decides to flee Jamaica for England for a while, whereas the flashbacks involving a younger Bob and Rita exist to show how the band came together. 

The issue is also not with the film's style. The picture often looks great - there's some gorgeous cinematography - and it is filled with not only some of Marley's most well known songs ("Jamming" and "Exodus"), but also some fantastic, lesser-known gems ("Turn Your Lights Down Low" and "Natural Mystic").

One of the issues is the picture's framing device - Marley's return from England to Jamaica to perform a peace concert is meant to unite the island's warring political factions several years after an assassination attempt was made on his life. While the concert itself might have been an intriguing window into the musician's life, it instead is utilized in the manner that is so familiar to many biopics of this type - an excuse for Marley to flash back on his life while awaiting the performance. 

Secondly, the film also includes the biopic trope that has always been a bit exasperating: the concept that musicians just make up songs on the fly when someone utters a phrase or an object in their line of sight causes momentary inspiration. In this case, Marley sings "Three Little Birds" to his sons when trying to convince them that everything will be alright amid Jamaica's unrest and, worse, during a sequence in which he catches his band members listening to the score to the 1960 film "Exodus" and seemingly comes up with the rhythm, lyrics, and overall sound to that song instantaneously.

"Bob Marley: One Love" isn't a bad film. The two lead performances are good - although virtually every other character is a minor sketch - and the film's lush visual style adds something. And, of course, you'll find no complaints here about spending two hours listening to Marley's music. But the music biopics that stand out for me are the ones that do a little something different - consider the remarkable Bob Dylan film "I'm Not There" or the N.W.A. bio "Straight Outta Compton." In comparison, this film is mostly by-the-numbers.

Review: Lisa Frankenstein

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

Zelda Williams' "Lisa Frankenstein" - which was penned by screenwriter Diablo Cody ("Juno" and "Jennifer's Body") - is a mostly unsuccessful attempt to capture the vibe of the early work of Tim Burton, namely "Beetlejuice" and "Edward Scissorhands." It's morbid and has a few laughs, but all adds up to a horror comedy that is missing the spark to make it spring to life.

The film follows the story of Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton), a goth-clad girl who has come to live with her inattentive father (Joe Chrest), her horror show of a stepmother (Carla Gugino), and her popular - but well-intentioned - stepsister, Taffy (Liza Soberano) in the wake of her own mother being murdered by a madman during a home invasion that only Lisa survived, a plot strand that is curiously undercooked and seemingly unnecessary.

Lisa is not particularly popular at her new school, and has a crush on the head of the school's literary magazine (Henry Eikenberry). But she spends much of her time at a local cemetery hanging out at the grave of a man (Cole Sprouse) who died young, but is somehow revived during a storm, another instance of an ill-explained plot thread. The film is set in 1989, so everyone is of course decked out in over-the-top clothing from that period.

The fact that the film is set in the 1980s seems to exist solely for the sake of the costume department, the ability to reference The Cure and include The Jesus & Mary Chain and When in Rome on the soundtrack, and because its source material - early Burton films - were from that era. Most of the other references - including an unexplainable sequence during which the resurrected young man plays piano and Lisa breathily sings along to REO Speedwagon's "Can't Fight This Feeling," a tune of which I was not aware was a goth standard - exist for no reason.

There are some funny moments scattered throughout. Lisa attempts to spruce up the resurrected corpse and there's a running joke that his tears smell - in Lisa's words - like "a toilet at a carnival." Most of the successful attempts at humor revolve around her aims to make him look the part of a young man in the late 1980s.

When the duo get involved in what can only be described as a killing spree - despite some of their victims being completely unsympathetic individuals - the film struggles to remain funny. There's a particularly grisly - for a PG-13 movie - sequence during which a character is separated from a specific body part that elicited some laughs during the screening I attended, but the manner in which the scene is shot plays much more horrifically than humorously.

Ultimately, "Lisa Frankenstein" is an empty exercise in pastiche. It's not as funny, lively, or bubbling with personality as the Burton films it is trying to mimic. "Beetlejuice" was significantly more engaging, and Edward Scissorhands cut a more dashing figure than the zombie who befriends Lisa in this film. Much like the character who has been revived from the dead, the film often just lumbers along.

Review: Argylle

Image courtesy of Apple Studios.

Matthew Vaughn's "Argylle" is an example of a movie starting out promisingly enough but then going downhill when a director indulges in his worst instincts. It's not a bad movie, but it is an overlong, overcooked, and over-the-top one.

The film's opening sequence involves the titular spy (Henry Cavill) taking part in a mission in which he must deal with an international criminal (Dua Lipa), and things go awry when Argylle's partner (John Cena) learns that the agency for which they work is actually the bad guy.

Then, we realize the story is merely the plot of a novel by a popular author named Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), who specializes in espionage fiction. Her books sell like gangbusters but she's a little creatively blocked on how to finish the fifth installment. Her mother (Catherine O'Hara) suggests they spend the weekend together to figure out the finale.

However, on the way there, Elly is intercepted by Aidan (Sam Rockwell), an actual spy who tells Elly that her books have caught the attention of an undercover agency known as the Division - which is similar to the one in her novels - who believe that her stories are actually predicative of actual goings-on in the spy world. If this sounds far fetched, there actually is an answer (also far fetched) as to why this is happening.

Aidan prevents Elly from being killed by a group of baddies aboard a train and the two of them flee to London, where they are pursued once more by the Division, which is operated by Ritter (Bryan Cranston), who shows no mercy for flunkies that make mistakes. From here, Aidan takes Elly to meet a man (Samuel L. Jackson) who was previously involved in the CIA.

And this is where the picture starts to go off the tracks - not at first, despite a somewhat ludicrous plot twist, but due to a number of deliriously over-the-top action sequences that follow. First, there are numerous double crosses, although not all of them are genuine and it's never that difficult to figure out who is on whose side. By the time we get to a dance sequence shootout filled with colorful tear gas and then shortly thereafter an ice skating-themed shootout, my thoughts wandered to whether an intervention might have helped.

"Argylle" is stylish, occasionally funny, entertaining enough early on, and it boasts some decent performances (Rockwell is the MVP here), but it's a case of there being too much for too long. Vaughn's films vary for me from enjoyable ("Layer Cake") to not-so-much (the "Kingsman" films). "Argylle is goofier and more likable than that latter series, although there's a post-scene credits sequence that was somewhat confusing and completely unnecessary that left me shaking my head.

This is a movie that has its moments, but it's also one that has entirely too many moments in general. There's no good reason for it to run two hours and 20 minutes and the excess of its final shootouts and fight scenes bring it down a notch. This could have been a better film had it been tighter, a little more focused, and a picture that utilized a less-is-more strategy.

The Best Movies Of 2023

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Yes, 2023 was not a particularly good year all around, but it was one of the better years for movies in recent memory.

Not only did I have difficulty narrowing down a top 10 - and you'll notice that I cheated slightly on that account - but it was challenging to even whittle my list down to a top 20. 

The year's two best films were long, ambitious works about significant moments in American history - one well documented, the other mostly swept under the rug. Many of the year's best films were ponderous - at least three in my second 10 fit this description while four in my top 10 were of a cerebral nature.

There was a pervasive sense of loneliness and melancholy in many of the year's best films, and even some of the cheerier pictures had a darker undertone. The movies fit the times, perhaps.

I like to give credit where it's due and help to get good movies seen, so since this year had so much to offer cinematically, these are some of the very good movies that didn't even crack my top 20 (in parenthesis, I'll rank them by number where they fall outside the list): The Boy and the Heron (21, reviewed here), Master Gardener (22, reviewed here), BlackBerry (23), Priscilla (24, reviewed here), Lynch/Oz (25, reviewed here), How to Blow Up a Pipeline (26), Tori and Lokita (27), Menus Plaisir Les Troisgros (28), The Eight Mountains (29), and Earth Mama (30).

Here are the 10 runners up:

20. RMN (Christian Mungiu) - The Romanian director's latest is unsettling and timely as a small town is overcome by anti-immigrant sentiment.
19. Falcon Lake (Charlotte Le Bon) - This French Canadian film is a coming-of-age story and a ghost story as well as a triumph of mood and tone.
18. Maestro (Bradley Cooper) - Visually gorgeous and ambitious, Cooper's second directorial effort further proves the actor's abilities behind the camera. Reviewed here.
17. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (Kelly Fremon Craig) - This warm and funny adaptation of Judy Blume's book does its source material justice. Reviewed here. 
16. Origin (Ava DuVernay) - DuVernay's latest is an inquisitive, ambitious, and moving blend of docudrama and investigation into systems of oppression. Reviewed here.
15. Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismaki) - The typically deadpan and downbeat Finnish director's latest is his best in a while and one of his gentlest. Reviewed here.
14. American Fiction (Cord Jefferson) - A biting satire on the publishing industry's interest in hearing Black stories, that is, as long as they help to ease white guilt. One of the year's funniest. Reviewed here.
13. The Killer (David Fincher) - Not the minor work that some might think, Fincher's latest enables the director to investigate some of his own obsessions, all the while delivering a darkly funny satire on late capitalism. Reviewed here.
12. May December (Todd Haynes) - Haynes' latest Sirkean melodrama asks us to uncomfortably consider how we love to hear about others' tragedies and grim circumstances, as long as we're bystanders and not participants. Reviewed here.
11. Barbie (Greta Gerwig) - The fact that Gerwig took one of the most iconic - and revenue producing - cultural objects of the past 60 years and used that as an opportunity to satirize the company that produced it, consumerism, and our patriarchal society alone makes it a triumph. The year's biggest blockbuster is also among the stranger ones to capture the public imagination. Reviewed here.

And now for the top 10:
10a. A Thousand and One (A.V. Rockwell) - Reviewed here.
10b. Air (Ben Affleck) - Reviewed here.
Yes, I cheated a little here. I didn't want to boot either of these films from my top 10. My rationale is that these were my two favorite films from the spring. The first is a devastating saga that utilizes the concept of the family you choose, set against the backdrop of Giuliani's New York, while the second is a superbly written and acted picture about the creation of a shoe, which ultimately becomes a captivating story about equity.
9. All Of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh) - The year's loneliest - and possibly saddest - film is a spectral love story and therapy session with an ending that is sure to spark debate. Haunting and luminous. Reviewed here.
8. Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos) - Another outrageous concoction from Greek director Lanthimos, this Frankensteinian saga of self discovery features a bold Emma Stone performance, some incredible camera work, and equal portions of the grotesque and the absurdly hilarious. Reviewed here.
7. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) - Glazer's studied take on Nazi Germany is, perhaps, the most horrifying PG-13 movie you'll ever see. Mostly utilizing the power of suggestion and observing characters discussing the unspeakable through banal workplace conversation, this is the year's most unsettling film. Reviewed here.
6. Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet) - This year's Palm d'Or winner at Cannes is a stunning slow burn about the nature of truth. The picture is a courtroom drama and somewhat a thriller, but it's most fascinating when it chronicles the dissolving of a relationship and its effect on a family. Reviewed here.
5. Asteroid City (Wes Anderson) - It took me two tries before I really got Anderson's latest, which does nothing less than question our place in the universe, but in the fussily arranged manner that we've come to expect from this singular director. The picture also includes this year's most intriguing cinematic mantra: You can't wake up if you don't go to sleep. Reviewed here.
4. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne) - For a movie that covers a lot of heavy ground - death, failed career ambitions, melancholy, and familial alienation - Payne's latest is also one of the year's funniest and warmest. This is a perfect example of how to take well-trod material and make it feel fresh with great performances and writing and a fresh perspective. Reviewed here.
3. Past Lives (Celine Song) - The best debut of this year or any in recent memory, Song's film is a wistfully romantic and crushingly sad story about the roads not taken. It's a twofer love story set over a period of decades that is wise and poignant. Reviewed here.
2. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese) - Over a period of three-and-a-half hours, Scorsese's historical epic painstakingly details the murder and greed by white interlopers that plagued the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. Leonardo DiCaprio (who was robbed by the Oscars) gives one of his finest performances and Robert De Niro is at his scariest here, but it's Lily Gladstone who is the heart and soul of the picture. The film's devastating coda will likely leave you speechless. Reviewed here. 
1. Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan) - It was a great challenge choosing between the year's top two films, both of which are epic American films that are destined to be classics. I went with Nolan's by a hair for the top spot. The picture is a fascinating dive into the past and a chilling warning for the future. This is an example of a major artist being given the creative freedom to create an ambitious work of art. On all fronts, it succeeds. Reviewed here.

Review: All Of Us Strangers

Image courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Andrew Haigh's "All Of Us Strangers" is a spectral love story and therapy session, and possibly the saddest movie I've seen this year. It has an ending that is likely to spark debate, but one thing that is likely to be agreed upon is that it is one of the most devastating depictions of loneliness that I've seen in some time.

As the film opens, Adam (Andrew Scott) is alone in his London apartment in a new complex that is seemingly only populated by one other person, a younger man named Harry (Paul Mescal) whom Adam will soon meet. Adam is a screenwriter, but he's seemingly given over to malaise and ennui. One night, Harry knocks on his door looking for a hookup - both men are homosexual, although they at one point have a debate over using the word queer vs. gay - but instead a connection is established.

To overcome his listlessness, Adam begins taking train rides to the town where he grew up with his mother and father, both of whom were killed in a car crash when he was 12 years old. One night while wandering in a field near his childhood home, a man in the distance beckons him to follow. It turns out to be his father (Jamie Bell), who lures Adam back to the place where he grew up and is soon greeted by his mother (Claire Foy).

"All of Us Strangers" is in many ways a ghost story - or, to be exact, ghost stories - but there's no fantastical reason to explain how Adam has stumbled upon his parents at the age shortly before they died. They recognize him as their son from a later point in time and the three take part in series of therapeutic catch-up sessions during which Adam's parents learn about the lonely life of their only son. 

Adam's mother takes the news that he is gay a little harder than his father. She seemingly can't wrap her head around it at first, tells him that he doesn't look gay (which garnered a laugh from the audience when I saw the film), and fears that he will, as a result, live a lonely life. 

Despite her backward way of thinking - Adam's parents died in the late 1980s - she is correct about her son being lonely and seemingly disconnected from others. And despite Adam being an openly gay man, he is nearly asexual, and appeared to be scared off from sex by the AIDS epidemic as a young man. Adam's father feels terribly that his son was bullied as a boy, but in a devastating moment admits that he would have likely bullied a young queer kid himself.

This is one of the loneliest feeling films I've seen in some time. The picture opens with Adam looking out of his window at the desolate London skyline, he and Harry are the only people in his building, and there's a scene near the end in which Adam and his parents eat at a diner as a ritual of sorts and the only other person seemingly there is the waitress. The only heavily populated sequence in the film is a nightclub scene and that moment is its most nightmarish. 

But it's not just the sense of isolation that makes "All Of Us Strangers" so moving. The scenes in which Adam catches up with his deceased parents could have come across as maudlin or, worse, gimmicky but instead they ring true because they feel like what it might be like to catch up with someone with whom you never had a sense of closure; there's no time for bullshitting, but simply getting straight to the point. 

There are two particular lines in the film that have stuck with me. At one point, Adam asks his mother how long she thinks their arrangement - seeing each other again - will last, and she tells him that it's not likely a choice they'll get to make. "I suppose we don't get to decide when it ends," Adam's mother tells him. Later, his father tells Adam that he and Adam's mother are proud of him. Adam notes that he hasn't done anything memorable to be proud of, and his father responds that surviving is the thing about which they are proud.

From the performances from all four actors to the film's varying tones - eerie, haunting, lonely, and even luminous - and its great use of music (the Pet Shop Boys' "Always on My Mind" is used to great effect, while Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "The Power of Love" carries a certain thematic relevance for Adam and Harry's burgeoning relationship), "All of Us Strangers" is an emotional slow burn that marks a creative peak for Haigh and is one of the year's most memorable films.

Review: The Zone Of Interest

Image courtesy of A24.

There's a jolting moment late in Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest," which is likely the most horrifying PG-13 movie you'll ever see, when a vision from the future briefly infiltrates the past. It's near the film's end as Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, is walking down a dark hallway. 

Rudolf briefly appears as if he's going to vomit but then pauses and the camera takes us through a peephole. Behind the door we see women in the present cleaning up what appears to be the Auschwitz camp in the modern day and age and it is now, of course, an historic site. Behind glass enclosures, we see stacks of shoes or clothing that were taken off the Jews who were murdered at the camp. The women clean the place with vacuums. Then, we cut back to the past as Rudolf makes his way down a dark staircase.

There will be different interpretations as to what Glazer was reaching for here, but it appeared to me to signify the preservation of the truth and the historical record after having spent nearly two hours in the company of characters who not only took part in mass murder, all the while speaking about it as any person would discuss their day-to-day job, but also spend much of the film obfuscating in one way or other.

The film opens with Rudolf and his wife, Hedwig (a ferocious Sandra Huller), and children bathing in a lake not too far from where they live. Their house is on the other side of the wall from Auschwitz, so there are numerous scenes of children playing in a makeshift lawn pool or taking part in games while just feet away we see smoke rising from the camp's gas chambers and hear the sounds of barking dogs, human screams, and occasional gunshots.

Adding to the horror of the normalcy during these proceedings are the dinner table conversations during which Hedwig and her visitors discuss stealing items of clothing - at one point, she tries on a Jewish woman's stolen coat and fishes a lipstick out of its pocket - from people who were likely killed just hundreds of feet from her home. Also jarring are meetings in which Rudolf takes part where he and fellow Nazi leaders discuss the extermination of thousands of people as if they were discussing the restocking of an item at a store or some other mundane thing that office workers might talk about.

The film is a study in what Hannah Arendt once called the banality of evil. Yes, Hitler's name is invoked here several times and Rudolf and his family occasionally make a passing remark that displays their disdain for Jews - but not enough to prevent them from keeping them as help around their house or, in Rudolf's case, having sex with one of them, an act that he follows by cleaning himself off in the sink quietly in the late night hours - but "The Zone of Interest" otherwise shows a group of people going about their daily lives, which include discussing work-related minutiae or concern about the well-being of their children.

And this is what makes it so disturbing and effective. On the one hand, the film doesn't necessarily humanize these people - Glazer's approach, as was the case in his 2013 masterwork "Under the Skin," is chilly and Kubrickian - but it certainly shows them as human. And, of course, it was humans - and not literal monsters - who carried out these atrocities.

To make matters even more unsettling, Glazer includes some experimental elements in the picture, including a sequence that looks as if it were shot with night-vision goggles during which a young girl collects fruit near the camp. The film opens with a completely black screen and warbling noises that go on seemingly forever - I wanted to point this out for viewers, so they don't think there's something wrong with the screen - and there are occasional long fades to black or, in one case, red.

The Auschwitz camp is never fully seen - in fact, there's only a shot of a blazing incinerator in the background as Rudolf looks up at the night sky in one scene. There's also no violence onscreen, which probably explains the film's rating. But the film is deeply unsettling regardless.

Back to that final scene. As I'd mentioned, my interpretation of it is that it shows Auschwitz in its present day iteration as an historic site where a horrible history is preserved. Throughout the film, Rudolf and his cohorts carry out their crimes in plain sight, but the movie's characters still behave as if they are acting in secret - one of Rudolf's children counts collected gold teeth from dead Jews with a flashlight under the covers at night, Rudolf hurries his children out of a popular swimming spot after he steps on a human bone, and Hedwig's mother first appears to be impressed with the home that her daughter and husband have built for themselves but after listening at night to the horrors taking place nearby, she leaves without so much as as goodbye. 

There are discussions throughout the film by Nazi officials in which they discuss the deportation and murder of thousands of Jews in an offhand manner, and while at the time they may have believed that their backroom scheming might have been kept under wraps, that shot of the women cleaning Auschwitz in the present day shows how these crimes have been preserved for all to witness some 80 years later. "The Zone of Interest" is, perhaps, the year's most unsettling film - and one of its best.

Review: Origin

Image courtesy of Neon.

Ava DuVernay's latest film, "Origin," is an inquisitive and ambitious blend of docudrama and an investigation into systems that lead to oppression. Sort of how Spike Jonze's "Adaptation" wasn't really an adaptation of "The Orchid Thief," DuVernay's film uses Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" as a jumping-off point. The film is not an adaptation of that work, but rather an adaptation of Wilkerson's journey that led to her writing the book.

As the film opens, Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is a successful author whose life is seemingly going well. Her previous book received acclaim, she has a loving relationship with her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal), and is close to her mother (Emily Yance), albeit concerned about having to move her into an assisted living home. In other words, she's not looking for a major life upheaval.

At a speaking engagement for her latest book, she runs into her editor (Blair Underwood), who asks her if she has heard of the ongoing case involving the murder of Trayvon Martin, a young Black man who was shot while taking a walk in a Florida neighborhood by George Zimmerman, a Latino man whom, her editor points out, claimed he was protecting a white neighborhood. As we all know, Zimmerman went on to defend his actions under that state's Stand Your Ground laws.

Although moved by the incident, Wilkerson isn't interested in writing anything about it. She no longer wants to take part in assignment journalism, preferring to write books in which she can immerse herself in the subject, which takes some time. But after her editor sends her a copy of the audio tape of the shooting, she changes her mind.

But she struggles with her thesis. Of course, racism resulted in Martin's death, but Wilkerson believes she has an idea for her book that links the incident with American slavery, the Holocaust, and the caste system in India, all the while throwing in tidbits involving comments made by her mother and Wilkerson's marriage to a white man. Her publisher (Vera Farmiga) doesn't see how the pieces all fit, but tells Wilkerson that writing a book is the "author's journey," and asks her to keep her posted on what she finds.

And what Wilkerson ultimately settles upon is that racism alone limits our understanding of why Martin was killed. She investigates the concept of caste systems, in which one group deems itself superior to another group - deemed inferior - and goes about creating laws and enforcing rules that reward the former while punishing the latter.

Naturally, the American institution of slavery is one of her key areas of focus, while Nazi Germany is another. Regarding the latter, Wilkerson discovers minutes from a Nazi party meeting during which German lawyers studied the American slavery system to write laws for Germany, and also follows the story of a former Nazi Party member who leaves the party to marry a Jewish woman. Another case involves a young Black American couple who are studying in Germany, only to flee after the Nazis take over and return home to join a white couple to take part in a study of oppressive systems in the American South.

Her final journey takes her to India, where she meets with a Dalit professor (Suraj Yengde, playing himself) who discusses Dalit activist Bhimrao Ambedkar with her and provides enlightenment on the caste system that dehumanizes Dalits - also known as untouchables - and forces them into a life of cruel subservience.

Not every sequence necessarily enforces Wilkerson's growing belief that caste systems are the oppressive forces that link history's great tragedies of the past two centuries. There's a sequence during which a plumber (Nick Offerman) wearing a Make America Great Again hat comes to fix Wilkerson's basement pipes. The sequence, at first tense, eventually finds the two reaching common ground on their aging parents, but the scene doesn't really add to the film's overarching thesis.

Regardless, this is a bold experiment. The film also uses Wilkerson's own personal life as a backdrop - she loses two people about whom she cares deeply early in the film, and the second half focuses on her relationship with a cousin (Niecy Nash), who during one of the film's best sequences asks Wilkerson to explain her thesis in layman's terms so that anyone can understand the links she's making between slavery, Nazi Germany, India, and ultimately, Martin's death. As she explains, it's a moment of enlightenment for both Wilkerson and her cousin as well as the audience.

DuVernay's best work has often dealt with battles against oppression, from her masterly "Selma" to the devastating American justice system documentary "13th." Her previous film, "A Wrinkle in Time," felt slight, so it's great to see her back on steady ground with "Origin," a movie that is highly ambitious and often deeply moving. I'd highly recommend it.

Review: American Fiction

Image courtesy of Orion Pictures.

Cord Jefferson's "American Fiction" is a particularly biting satire about how the predominantly white publishing industry and its readership are limited in their interest in the types of stories told by Black authors. 

It's humor lies in satirizing white people of so-called noble intention who proclaim they want to hear Black voices, but are only interested in listening to stories - primarily Black trauma narratives - that help assuage their guilt. There is a genre, perhaps, waiting to be defined that might include this film along with "Get Out" and "Sorry to Bother You."

There's a particularly telling moment late in the film. It's the type of scene that might make you laugh aloud, but also lands as a punch in the gut. Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) has agreed to participate as a judge for a literary awards committee that also includes only one other person of color - Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), an author whose recent success he has mimicked. 

Ellison's work is praised by his pal and publisher, Arthur (John Ortiz), as intelligent and well-crafted, but his books just don't sell. He attends a conference where he hears Golden read an excerpt from her novel, "We's Lives in Da Ghetto," which depicts what he believes to be over-the-top stereotyped caricatures. And yet, the predominantly white audience listening to the reading gives her a standing ovation.

Out of anger - and partly as a prank - Monk writes a satirical novel depicting the foibles of a Black criminal on the run who confronts his deadbeat father and dies at the hands of the police. The novel is meant to satirize what the white establishment believes Black writers should write about - and then is shocked when publishers and movie executives nearly beat down his door to publish the novel. On top of this, Monk has written under a pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh, and is pretending to be a convict on the lam who just happens to have written an autobiographical novel.

Back to the literary awards committee. It just so happens that Monk's faux novel - originally titled "My Pafology," but later changed to "Fuck" - is one of the novels being considered for the award. Both Monk and Golden say that the novel should not be considered for a prize - Golden calls it "pandering" and Monk finds an opportunity later to question her intentions regarding her own novel. However, the rest of the white board members on the committee want to award it the top prize. "We should be listening to Black voices right now," the white people tell the two Black committee members, overriding their opinion.

There's a whole lot more going on in "American Fiction," including Monk's dealing with the sudden death of his sister, the slow creep of Alzheimer's in his mother, the upcoming wedding of a long-time caretaker whom the family loves, secrets regarding his father, a romance with a spunky neighbor (Erika Alexander), and a difficult relationship with his brother, Clifford (an excellent Sterling K. Brown), a plastic surgeon who is recently divorced, newly gay, and a hot mess.

"American Fiction" succeeds in most departments - as an often hilarious social satire about the constraints put on Black artists, a legitimately engaging and occasionally moving saga of a family's difficulties, and a great showcase for the under-appreciated Wright, who gives one of his best - and one of his highest-profile - performances to date. Its finale veers toward the fantastical, but it also feels right when measured against the film's thesis. For a feature film debut, this is impressive work.