Flicks with The Film Snob

White Noise, the latest film from director Noah Baumbach, is so different than what we're used to seeing, that I was delighted, and a little surprised, that the audience I saw it with was able to accept its surreal style and laugh at its offbeat humor. It's a comedy about modern American life, which is about as general a description as you could get, but whereas we associate comedies normally with jokes, gags, and silliness, there's hardly any of that here. The comedy is in the overall tone of the picture: the version of life that's presented, reflecting the brilliant, peculiar world view of a single author. Up until now, of all the theatrical features that Baumbach has directed in a career spanning over two decades, this is the first not based on a story by him. White Noise is adapted from the 1985 novel of that name by Don DeLillo, the book that made him famous, winning the National Book Award. DeLillo's fiction, his dark, widely ranging satiric style, examining the different kinds of madness and catastrophe we see in American society, is so distinctive, that I think adapting it helped channel Baumbach's energy in a direction that represents a new artistic advance for him. Adam Driver, plays Jack Gladney, a professor at a Midwestern college who helped found “Hitler studies.” For someone whose subject involves great political upheaval, he seems a mild-mannered guy. On the outside, his life is close to perfect: he has a beautiful wife named Babette, played by Greta Gerwig, and four children, three from their previous marriages, and one from their own. The kids are all hyper-aware and intellectually curious, in general more in touch with what's going on than their parents. Baumbach has retained the time period of the book, so we're in the 1980s, with no cell phones and no internet. And this vantage point of the past, even though it was the present when DeLillo wrote the book, turns out to be amazingly predictive of problems and concerns that we're facing now. First we enter a free-wheeling satiric depiction of academic life, with the usual petty conflicts, and here we are gifted with an outstanding, hilarious performance by Don Cheadle as a professor of Elvis Presley studies. Now be prepared: none of the dialogue in this film is naturalistic. People are always making statements about life and society in a deadpan, almost abstract manner that mixes the most profound thoughts with absolutely trivial attention to detail. There are always surprising bits of chatter and turns of phrase that paint the story with a tinge of folly. There's no topic: marriage, sex, politics, religion, that escapes untouched. Eventually there's a plot development involving a train accident in which a huge cloud of toxic fumes escapes into the atmosphere. Existential dread enters the picture, and permeates the rest of the film, even as we keep laughing, for instance at Jack's constant need to downplay, to a ridiculous level, the danger that threatens them, in the face of the obvious panic of his wife and kids. The misinformation around this toxic event may remind you, painfully, of what we've seen in the current Covid-19 pandemic. Eventually we get into a “family running for their lives” disaster film scenario, but reduced to the funniest and most outlandish extremes. Baumbach's visual texture is intense and colorful. There's so much going on that you might get a little dizzy. But for me, White Noise was an invigorating comic experience, hitting that rare sweet spot between profundity and the absurd.

A drama of a woman unjustly ostracized reveals deeper meanings, in a breakthrough work of Mexican cinema. María Candelaria, a 1943 film by Emilio Fernandez, is a prime example from what is considered the “golden age” of Mexican cinema. The title character, María (played by Dolores del Rio), a young Indian peasant living in the river country of Xochimilco, has been ostracized by her village because of a scandal involving her deceased mother. She is loved by Lorenzo (played by Pedro Armendáriz), who hopes to marry her when they can get enough money, but they are in debt to a corrupt landowner who wants María for himself, and so tries to destroy them out of jealousy. Meanwhile an artist (Alberto Galan) from a nearby town who wishes to paint the beautiful María, tries to help the couple get out of danger. The plot elements are pure melodrama, but the treatment raises the story to another level. The heroine represents a spirit of independence, freedom, and a love that is not cowed by custom or tradition. The villagers use ideas of honor and virtue to justify their own envy and hatred, and the film condemns hypocrisy in sexual matters as well, which was rather advanced for its time. Fernández and his co-screenwriter, Mauricio Magdaleno, cleverly wrap their social consciousness in the conventions of popular fiction—we instinctively identify with the downtrodden María and recognize the morality of the villagers as false. They also set up a dichotomy between the light-skinned ruling class and the Indian peasants, which must have struck a chord with Mexican audiences. The film was a major success at home, and won the top prize at Cannes, the first Latin American film to do so, and this helped foster a boom in Mexican cinema during the late 1940s. Del Rio had been a Hollywood star for years—here she looks at least a decade younger than her actual age of 38. The part calls for sensitivity and nobility, and she comes through with flying colors. The acting in general is quite good, but the real reasons the film works as well as it does are Fernández’s fluid style and the photography of Gabriel Figueroa. The budget was miniscule by American standards, but Figueroa’s luminous black-and-white images lend the film a haunting, almost mythic grandeur. The camera movement has a calm, graceful rhythm. Fernandez also uses some striking point-of-view shots, as in a scene where we see Lorenzo from below as he rows down the river while María lies in the boat looking up at him. María Candelaria portrays the struggles and tragedies of the poor in a way that is affecting without becoming maudlin. The ending finally achieves something close to poetry.

The painful struggles between parents and children are often a subject of drama, and no surprise, given the plentiful examples of this theme in human experience. What is rare and more difficult is the depiction of a strong emotional bond between a kid and a parent, and in the case of children, a love for one's mother and father that goes beyond words, a kind of environment in the child's mind that permeates life and leaves a lasting effect on the memory. Too often the artist, in a play or film, settles for a forced sense of sweetness, a sentimental, albeit often humorous, perspective on the young experience and point of view. Aftersun, the debut feature from Scottish writer and director Charlotte Wells, is that “one in a thousand” film that captures the essence of a fleeting time with devastating intensity and truth. Sophie is an 11-year-old girl on a summer holiday with her divorced dad at a less than luxurious seaside resort in Turkey. To sum up the plot, the story of what happens, is pretty much exactly what I just said. There is really no story in the usual sense—the big events happen within the characters, and especially within Sophie, played by a luminous young newcomer named Frankie Corio. The film is more like a poem, and a very beautiful one. The one-word title Aftersun, sounds enigmatic like a poem—in fact, it's a lotion that's applied to cool off the skin after exposure to the sun. But even this mundane detail can double as metaphor. Sophie loves her father Calum, played by Paul Mescal, and we soon realize that he's quite remarkable in his way, a man in his 30's who listens with steady attention to Sophie and treats her with tenderness and consideration. But of course we the audience can also see that he's an ordinary man with flaws, and with a life largely unknown to her, who lives near London with her mother the rest of the year and doesn't get to see him much. Through various hints—music and other references—we gradually realize that this is happening in the 1990s, and we're seeing all this as a memory of the adult Sophie today. This layer of memory, like the cooling aftersun of the title, evokes poignant feelings, a steady light of emotion in the heart of the future self looking on the experience through the eyes of the past self, so fleeting and so precious. Wells already shows a mastery of style that can visually explore the dawning awareness of this young girl's own mind and feelings, relentlessly expanding with image and sound the richness of an inner life which sees everything in this world as if brand new. There's much Wells has decided not to tell us. Why did Sophie's mother leave her father? Why Turkey, why are they vacationing there? What is the meaning of the father's melancholy, the shadows that so often stay hidden? These are all meant to be just hints, rather than plot points, hints like the incomplete knowledge kids have of the adult world, a world that Sophie is very curious about, and yet cautious of. And I kept expecting some tragic event to happen in the film, which never did, because the only tragedy here is the transience of beauty and love. It amazes me, I marvel at how once in a great while, a movie will come out of nowhere—filmmakers and actors with which I'm not familiar—and then when I just happen to see it, absolutely destroys me. I'm sure in some way it touches my own memories with my father, now departed, in that bittersweet way we can't always express. All I really know is that the devastating artistry of Aftersun shot me right through the heart.

Howard Hawks’ classic 1946 crime film stars Humphrey Bogart as hard-boiled L.A. detective Philip Marlowe, trying to solve one of the most complicated mysteries ever made. It's hard for me to believe that I've been doing this show for 17 years, and yet I haven't talked about one of my favorite movies, The Big Sleep, until now. I'm referring to the 1946 Howard Hawks film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The Big Sleep was originally a crime novel by Raymond Chandler, featuring Chandler's recurring hard-boiled detective character Philip Marlowe. Bogart plays Marlowe. He also played Dashiell Hammett's detective Sam Spade five years earlier in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, making him the only actor to have played both these iconic characters. Actually he was always playing the most entertaining character of all, Humphrey Bogart. But I digress. Marlowe gets hired by an old man, General Sternwood, who has received threatening letters concerning the payment of his youngest daughter's gambling debts. The assignment is to find out what kind of trouble the daughter, named Carmen, is actually in, and help her out of it, if possible. What he soon finds is the blackmailer's dead body, in a gangster's deserted house, with a drugged Carmen there as, apparently, the fall girl. She is a wild seductive young socialite, played with sleazy zest by the 20-year-old Martha Vickers. Back at the Sternwood's, Marlowe encounters Carmen's older sister, Vivian, played by Lauren Bacall, who doesn't seem very happy to meet him, and as it turns out has her own secrets to protect. Marlowe's relationship with Vivian becomes both romantic and dangerous. To try to follow the plot any further would involve a dizzying array of killers, gamblers, kidnappers, cops, and blackmailers. Bogart strides through this incredibly complicated story with complete disregard for niceties and a humorous quip for every occasion. The film is often quite funny. Ultimately, though, the title The Big Sleep refers to death, and Marlowe's smart aleck tough guy is surrounded by darkness and menace at all times. The constant sense of danger heightens the movie's excitement, while the main character's brass-knuckled self assurance puts a smile on our face. A lot of people call it film noir, and I suppose it is, but it's directed by Howard Hawks, and that means, before anything else, that it's fun. Many critics and viewers complain that the plot is impossible to understand. Supposedly even the screenwriters—one of whom was William Faulkner—had some trouble figuring out exactly who killed whom. But the truth is, the picture was first shot in 1945, and that version, which some DVD or Blu Ray editions include as an extra, was understandable, although admittedly complicated. But the producers didn't think that it was enough. Bogie and Bacall were an item at this point, and they wanted the romance between those two highlighted. So Hawks cut out a few scenes, and parts of scenes here and there, inserted new scenes of the two main characters doing witty repartee and double entendre, and redid the ending emphasizing Bacall more, and it all worked. The chemistry between Bogie and Bacall really improved the movie's snap. The only trouble is, the stuff that was cut out explained quite a few things in the plot that now seem sketchy in the final version. But… none of this ever harmed my enjoyment of the film, which is really about the energy and dark intrigue, plus brilliant dialogue and of course Bogart's dynamic performance. I've watched The Big Sleep again and again for years, and I'm not tired of it yet.

The cinematic world is abuzz with praise for the latest film from Korean director Park Chan-wook entitled Decision to Leave. Park is already well known for his daring movies treating themes of horror and violence, most famously The Handmaiden, and Oldboy. As it happens, Decision to Leave is something of a departure for him, a stylish murder mystery and intense romantic suspense film. Although the new picture has relatively less violence or horror, Park's love of provocative experimentation remains. The story concerns a homicide detective from Busan named Jang Hae-joon, and played by the very skillful Park Hae-il. He's a dogged investigator in his 40s, with a lovely wife that lives in another town and whom he only sees on weekends. Currently assigned to a sensational murder case, he is called one night to what looks like a bad accident—a climber has fallen off a steep cliff to his death. But the dead man, an immigration officer, has DNA traces under his fingernails, which match the DNA of his wife, Song Seo-rae. Suspicion falls on her because she shows no surprise or sorrow when told of her husband's death. Medical records, however, show that she had been physically abused many times by her husband, who beat her and scratched her, which would explain the DNA under the fingernails. So the evidence begins to point to suicide rather than foul play. But this mysterious woman, Seo-rae, begins to evoke an attraction in the cop investigating her. She's Chinese, and her difficulty speaking Korean somehow adds to her strange charm. Seemingly against his will, Jang becomes gradually more obsessed with her, to the point that it becomes noticeable to his colleagues, who complain that he's neglecting the high-profile murder case of which he's in charge. Park's sense of screen composition is so smooth and assured that Decision to Leave can't help but remind me of great Hollywood films from the classic era, and specifically of Alfred Hitchcock. The idea of a man's overpowering obsession with an unknowable love object is of course paralleled in Hitchcock's great 1958 film Vertigo. But this movie has a different emphasis and a more modernist technique. When the film reveals something from the past, instead of clearly demarcating the different time frames in some way, Park cuts suddenly to a similar shot and point of view, when we suddenly realize we're in the past, without a transition. This creates a fluid subjective quality—we're inside Jang's head, where his experience and memory become interchangeable. And the film does the same thing with space as with time. At one point, Jang is doing surveillance of Seo-rae with binoculars, in his car outside her building. But then, as she picks up the telephone, he is suddenly in the room gazing at her, sniffing the air, and then she looks straight out the window, startling him, and all this time he is still in the car. The multilayered visual style depicts almost tangibly the progression of Jang's mad love for this woman, who remains a suspect. I don't think this would work so well if Park hadn't chosen the perfect person to play Seo-rae, the subtly beautiful Chinese actress Tang Wei. Tang doesn't play a seductress here. On the contrary, her seriousness and the ambiguity of her facial expressions convey the idea that this is someone who is wholly her own person, and someone you want to believe. The murder mystery is complicated, and the viewer must pay close attention to follow it. But the real story here is the emotional journey of a man desperately and dangerously in love. Decision to Leave is a glittering jewel of a film.

The endlessly cyclical nature of life is depicted as four different stories in a sleepy Italian village. Le Quattro Volte, a film from 2010 by Michelangelo Frammertino, is like a vision of an ancient world, although the story takes place in our century. I call it a story, but it has more of the quality of myth. The slow rhythm of daily life for an old goat herder in Calabria is conveyed superbly and with precise meditative attention. It's a life of routine, which the old man, who is in bad health, endures without regret. Calabria is the poorest region in Italy, the part in the south that looks like the toe of a boot on the map—rugged hilly, and mountainous. The goat herder's village in the film is perched on top of a hill, with rustic architecture that looks like we're still in the Middle Ages. The goats are in a pen at the town limits, as the road out snakes downward. Every day he walks steadily to the pen, rouses the herd, and then leads them out and into the surrounding hills and meadows. While they feed on grass and other plants, he sits quietly, sometimes dozing off. With him is a shepherd dog, a border collie, who knows exactly how to lead the goats where the herder wants them. As the film immerses us in the steady, repetitive life in this rural area, we notice the unspoken bond between the man and the dog, and in fact with the goats as well. All is expressed more in grunts and sighs than in words. I tried to find the subtitle function on the Blu Ray I was watching, and I realized that there were no subtitles, because so very little is said during the movie that you don't need them. Silence itself is almost a major character. Outside of the credits, there's no musical score. Instead, the outstanding sound design presents all the little sounds of the country—the wind and the animals—in all the complexity they reveal in nature. The title of the film, Le Quattro Volte, means The Four Times. Why is that? We start to find out when our attention leaves the goatherd and focuses on a little newborn goat. Now, the story, if we can call it that, is all about this one tiny being and his daily actions and struggles living in the herd. The gentle beauty we've experienced shows another side: the harsh necessities of survival, depicted in the most elemental and heart-rending way when the baby goat gets separated from the others and wanders about crying for help, finally resting, all tired out, beneath a tall tree. The tree is now the main character, and we are shown its life and presence, the waving of branches and rustling of leaves, and once again an eternal quiet at the heart of life. Suddenly it's winter. Snow covers the ground. Men chop down the tree, and take it to town. Now it's an inanimate object, and they use it as part of a holiday celebration. After that, it's burned, turned into charcoal, and becomes part of a large kiln carefully built and operated by the villagers. The four times are four lives: human, animal, vegetable, and mineral. The idea that the mineral also has a kind of life is part of an ancient world view in which everything, animate or not, is filled with spirit. Frammertino was inspired by the legend that the philosopher Pythagoras claimed to remember living four lives. The doctrine is called metempsychosis, but the movie isn't teaching a doctrine—it's just inspired by this idea of transmigrating souls to envision nature subjectively, as being a person, a goat, a tree, a piece of charcoal. The experience of watching Le Quattro Volte is like nothing else in cinema. It's a film of spiritual sublimity.

Joanna Hogg continues her semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist, a young woman filmmaker in 1980s England exploring grief. The Souvenir: Part II is the name of the latest film from English director Joanna Hogg. When you release a Part II, the assumption is that we first need to see Part I. With The Godfather: Part II, to give a famous example, it was a pretty safe assumption given how successful and widely seen the first film was. The Souvenir, however, released in 2019, is not in that category. Hogg's insistence on calling this movie The Souvenir: Part II shows the supreme self-confidence that can often accompany brilliance. In any case, the two films do form a continuous whole, and would be best watched in order. The Souvenir ended with a tragic event in the life of the main character, Julie, a young student director in 1980s England, played by Honor Swinton Byrne. Part II opens with her struggling with grief for her boyfriend Anthony, who was a brilliant, charismatic, yet rather mysterious person. Julie tries to find out all she can about him from his parents and anyone else who knew him, but there's always something elusive about her search. Her mother, Rosalind, is played by the actress's actual mother, Tilda Swinton. One of the results of this fortunate bit of casting is that scenes between the two have a special intimacy that you can sense. The closeness goes along with a gap in understanding, though: Rosalind worries about Julie, but doesn't see how her daughter's unusual questions and struggles contribute to her development as an artist. At film school, the panel overseeing her proposed graduate film has a negative reaction to the script she submits. In The Souvenir she was working on a film with a realist technique, about a boy and his mother in a poor neighborhood in a northern city. But this feature-length screenplay is a personal story using more symbolic methods, based on her own recent life, which we've seen play out in the first film. Despite this discouraging reaction, Julie is committed to the project. Now we watch as her search for answers is incorporated into the making of her graduate film. Hogg portrays the process of low-budget filmmaking with a sharp eye, including the work's essential tedium. A fellow student, a French woman named Garance, suggests to Julie a young actor of talent whom she knows to play the boyfriend role. Julie then surprises Garance by asking her to play the lead part, basically Julie's character, even though this disappoints another friend who has long been a supporter and who expected a part. Here we see how the evolution of an artistic project tends not to take the path of least resistance, but results from having to grapple with the material and discover what it demands, even if that upends expectations. The film is essentially a portrait of the artist—the story has many autobiographical elements, yet I'm referring to the wider sense of the artist in general. The director wants us to experience the creative process from the inside through the techniques she uses in her film. One of the crucial things conveyed is that there is always a great difference between the film in her head and the one she actually makes. When Julie's picture—called The Souvenir, of course—is finally approved and screened, instead of being shown the end product, we enter Julie's mind as a sort of luminous dream world where the characters and the symbols are charged with emotion and meaning, and the thoughts and impressions our main character has been working with throughout the film are embodied in visual terms. The Souvenir: Part II confirms Joanna Hogg as one of the more stylistica

A portrait of a creative genius, a conductor and composer played by Cate Blanchett, explores the dark and unacknowledged heartlessness behind the vigor and prestige of a famous artist. Tár is the name of a new film written and directed by Todd Field. The main character, Lydia Tár, is a prominent American classical music conductor and composer, played by Cate Blanchett. We meet her at the height of her career, after heading several world-class orchestras, now the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, arguably the most prestigious position in the symphonic world. The film opens with her being interviewed at a New York film festival, where the brilliance of her intellect shines freely, discussing conducting in general, and her upcoming recording of Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Behind Tár's smooth and articulate presentation, there is a hint of something else, and I think it's deliberate: smug condescension. Perhaps the supreme self-confidence of such a person will inevitably cast this shadow. Lydia is a fictional character, of course, but Field has created an extraordinary and multifaceted personality for Blanchett to bring to life. It's all very well to indicate that your heroine is in fact a genius. It's quite another to write a character who makes you really believe it. Lydia's talk is so sophisticated that we can truly admire, while at the same smile a little at the ironic touches the director adds to the portrait, the will of steel underneath the suave exterior, the strongly held convictions that drive every aesthetic statement, every literary allusion. The film presents us with a convincingly brilliant artist. But of course the writing depends on the performer for its realization. Field had in mind Cate Blanchett, one of our best living film actors, from the beginning. Lydia has an extremely busy and complicated life. On the personal side, she is openly lesbian, living with her partner Sharon, the orchestra's head violinist, played by the great Nina Hoss, with whom she has adopted a girl. We see her as a teacher, outspoken and even ruthless in her attitude towards what she sees as the timidity of some of her students. We see her as the super-efficient manager of her own career, so competent and controlling that she intimidates even those who work closest with her. The extraordinary thing is that in the midst of all this, we are made to suspect intuitively that there is a kind of emptiness at work, a big impressive show without a center. Todd Field knows that classical tragedy portrays the fatal defects of larger-than-life figures. His screenplay and direction achieve a novelistic density, so that when events start to go wrong, it's not really about hubris, but about a host of uncomfortable questions concerning artists and the needs that drive artistic creation, about the self-seeking that dominates people, about passion and its discontents. Lydia has apparently had a habit of picking out female musicians to fall in and out of love with, brief infatuations and affairs. One of these young women angered her when they broke up, and instead of letting the matter go, Lydia decided to make sure that this poor girl would be blacklisted from getting a job in any orchestra. This is the start of things unraveling, but there are depths and shadows here that are more significant than just this one transgression, and they are slowly revealed. Blanchett appears in a lot of genre pieces, as any steadily working Hollywood actress has to do, but here once more she is given the chance at something great, and she takes it even further than we expect. The musical sequences are stunning. Tár is a film of lavish beauty and desolating insight.  

Terence Davies dramatizes the remarkable life of the World War One poet Siegfried Sassoon, weaving back and forth in time to show how much he and others like him lost because of war. For many modern historians, the First World War, from 1914-18, has a special significance, as the point at which an older version of civilization fell apart. In British thought and memory it sometimes has the character of an unhealed wound. Almost 900 thousand young British soldiers died, about 6% of the adult male population. It was as if the flower of English youth had been cut off. In the writings of the poets who fought in that war we still read passionate urgency. Siegfried Sassoon was one of those poets. His father was of Iraqi Jewish descent, his mother a Christian. He was not of German ancestry; his mother chose the name Siegfried because of her love of the music of Richard Wagner. English director Terence Davies has largely focused in his films on exploring and recovering personal and cultural legacies. In his latest film, Benediction, he tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, not in a straightforward or linear fashion, but as a weaving back and forth in time, a recapturing of Sassoon's experience that takes into account his loves and strengths, but also his mistakes and failures. Incredibly courageous, loved and trusted by the men who served with him, Sassoon, played beautifully as a young man by Jack Lowden, was decorated for bravery and recommended for the Victoria Cross. But when we meet him in the film, he's caused a sensation by publishing an open letter, what he called “a soldier's declaration,” denouncing the conduct of the war and saying he would no longer fight. Instead of being court-martialed he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. In an early scene, he argues with a close friend, the prominent critic Robbie Ross, played by Simon Russell Beale, because Ross had pulled some strings to prevent Sassoon possibly being shot. Sassoon wanted to put his life on the line to oppose the war, but Ross simply wanted his friend to survive. In the hospital, Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen, another poet, and the impact Owen has on his life, both as a poet and as a gay man, is decisive. Wilfred Owen went back to his unit after being pronounced cured by psychiatrists, and he died only a week before the Armistice. The film covers Sassoon's tumultuous life after the war, as a member of the London artistic scene in the 1920s, intercut with scenes of him as an older man, now played by Peter Capaldi, still bitter about the war and about his personal failures, and ultimately turning to the Catholic Church in search of some kind of meaning. In the 1920s, gay life in the London art scene was barely closeted—it was quite evident to anyone who could see, yet no one talked about it publicly. Davies presents us with the sometimes very funny, but also painful, episodes of backbiting and cutting wit on the part of Sassoon and his lovers, including the musician and actor Ivor Novello, with a malicious personality, and the decadent aristocrat Stephen Tennant, self-centered to the point of abuse. Terence Davies is openly gay himself, and here he succeeds in presenting an historical portrait of gay relationships in a specific English time and place, without holding back. Sassoon got married eventually and had a son, but in the scenes with him as an old man, we can sense that there's still an emptiness inside that may never be filled. Why is that? At film's end, in a sequence of almost unbearable poignance, we find out. I cried at the end of Benediction, a film in which personal and historical tragedy embrace.

A primal conflict between love and revenge is the theme of Mauritz Stiller’s great saga of Sweden from 1919. The silent era in Europe is still a largely unexplored treasure house of film, and among the foremost nations in cinema was Sweden, where for a brief time innovations there rivaled those taking place in America. The brilliant young Mauritz Stiller brought sophistication and technical mastery to his movies, although today he's better known, if at all, for having discovered Greta Garbo, with whom he went to Hollywood, ultimately failing to fit into the rigid hierarchy of the studio system and returning to Sweden, where he fell ill and died in 1928, at the much too early age of 45. Today I offer one of Stiller's great Swedish films, from 1919, called Sir Arne's Treasure. Here's the story: in 16th century Sweden, a rebellion of the King´s Scottish guards is put down. Three of the rebels make a daring escape from a prison tower, but on their way through the snow to a fishing village where they hope to find a ship, extreme cold and hunger drives them mad with desperation. When they come to the mansion of Sir Arne, a wealthy nobleman, they murder him and his family, steal the treasure, burn the castle down, and escape. But a girl named Elsalill (played by Mary Johnson) survives the carnage by hiding. Years later, adopted and living in a different town, Elsalill falls in love with the noble young lord Sir Archi, played by Richard Lund, unaware that he was one of the murderers. Stiller was already a veteran director when he adapted this Selma Lagerlof story to the screen, and it is a masterful work, as advanced in technique as anything that had been seen at the time, albeit on a smaller scale than D.W. Griffith´s epics. He makes extensive use of the moving camera, which was rare, and his habit of cutting into the middle of an action creates an effect more modern than in most silent films. The scene in which neighbors rush to the burning castle brilliantly conveys chaos and terror. Over the entire film, in fact, there hangs a mood of ominous fatefulness and “the uncanny,” exemplified by marvelous sequences in which the young woman dreams of her dead sister. In addition, Stiller handles Elsalill´s love for the Scottish nobleman poignantly, yet with very little sentimentality. Unexpectedly, and quite movingly, these troubled characters do not behave as we would expect in a melodrama, but in a more convincing and ultimately more tragic manner. Shot by Jules Jaenzon, Sweden´s preeminent cinematographer, Sir Arne´s Treasure is an uncommonly gorgeous motion picture. The ending scene with the procession across the ice is among the most haunting and beautiful in all of cinema. It's both exciting and instructive to see how a pioneer could create fully realized visual poetry in those early days. Sir Arne's Treasure is available on DVD.

Inconsolable grief leads to resistance in a film from Lesotho combing mythic and political truth. This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection. Like a myth or a folktale, the third feature film of Mosoto writer and director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese announces its meaning beforehand with its title. But woven into that one sentence—this is not a burial, it's a resurrection—are many other complex meanings concerning death, grief, ignorance, oppression, truth, courage, and more. In a rural village in Lesotho, a small country in southern Africa, an 80-year old woman named Mantoa laments the death of her only son. Over the years she has experienced the death of her parents, her husband, her daughter and grandchild. But after all this, her son was there to still anchor her to the world. Now he is gone too. Eventually we piece together that he died in a mining accident, but we don't know the full story behind any of these losses, only that Mantoa has survived her entire family. Now she no longer finds meaning in life. Mantoa is played by an awe-inspiring veteran actress from South Africa, Mary Twala Mhlongo. She portrays overpowering grief with an intensity and conviction that is uncanny. And this was her final performance—Mary Twala died in 2020. So…all Mantoa wants is to die and be buried in the graveyard with her family and the village ancestors. She assumes a grim silence, impervious to all efforts by the villagers to interact. The priest sits outside her door and tries to talk to her. He tells her about the death of his wife, and his long struggle to get through the grief. Mantoa hears him, she hears them all, but she's immovable. Her face is like a mask of pain. Mosese seems to be presenting us with a modern day Book of Job. Religious teachings no longer make any sense to Mantoa. She has nothing but anger at God. She experiences all the attempts at consolation to be empty, and who could say that she is wrong in her point of view? Also like Job is her defiance, her refusal to look away from tragedy. In this version of Job, however, there's something more. When she complains about trash not being picked up in the graveyard, she finds out that the graveyard, and in fact the entire village, is going to be flooded, and everyone relocated because of a new dam that's going to be built. The village head tells everyone that it's all part of modern progress. The priest says they must accept the inevitable and trust God. But Mantoa sees that the unseen enemies, the businessmen and politicians who are planning this project, are taking away the very earth in which her family is buried, that is, the connection to ancestors, to shared history, and to the life that has been bound to this land for generations. What we're not told, but what we can infer if we've studied colonialism, is that the practice of denying native ownership of the land has not ended with the country's so-called independence. In this story, it's the fate of a defiant old woman with nothing more to lose, to embody the force of resistance. With starkly beautiful photography and an eerie musical score, the movie also uses a framing device that evokes an ironic mythos. An old storyteller narrates the film intermittently while playing a traditional stringed instrument called a lesiba. Yet this fabled figure is sitting in a rough-looking urban setting, sitting in the ruins of some tavern in a darkened city. We are in the real modern world, and we are also in the absolute world of ancient symbols. Mosese unites the high with the low in an experience both mystical and political. This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection.

A witty English drama from John Schlesinger about an unusual triangle: a man and a woman both in love with the same man. John Schlesinger was part of an exciting generation of young English directors that emerged in the 1960s. He established himself with several successful films, and this gave him the opportunity to break all the rules by making Midnight Cowboy, which became a huge hit. After this triumph, Schlesinger had earned the right to do his own thing—and next he created a more personal film, a story he'd been thinking about for years. Released in 1971, it's called Sunday Bloody Sunday. The title, by the way, doesn't refer to the famous event in Northern Ireland, or the song by U2 about it, which all came later. Here it's just from a common male expression in England at that time, a weary shrug on a Sunday about having to go back to work or school the next day. The story is infused with this ironic tone—the style of someone who observes people with a compassionate but honest eye. In London, Daniel, a Jewish doctor (Peter Finch) and Alex, a divorced mother (Glenda Jackson), are both in love with the same man—a bisexual artist named Bob, played by Murray Head. The story covers ten days in these three people's lives, in which their love for and patience with one another are sorely tried. Schlesinger deftly sidesteps the social drama angle, keeping the focus on private feelings and desires. The picture pays careful attention to the little incidents that make up a day—it has a refreshing natural rhythm. Everything that happens is colored by the longings of Daniel and Alex. Bob is their happiness, and sometimes they are indeed happy when he’s with them, but he’s also an elusive object, a source of anxiety: Will he leave? Will he run to the other one? It’s written like a modern short story, where plot takes a back seat to permutations of feeling. There’s something remarkably clear-eyed about the movie—the emotions of the characters are real and moving, yet there’s a humorous bite and distance—nothing maudlin, very crisp and even a bit cold. When Peter Finch and Murray Head do a full mouth kiss in close-up early in the film, I believe that was some sort of a cinematic first. I don’t doubt that it was intended to surprise—in plot terms alone, it’s a way to suddenly let us know that Daniel and Bob are lovers. But what I find admirable is that gay sexuality is not sensationalized, it's simply an important element of Daniel’s character, and it is taken for granted as a fact in itself—which for 1971 was more than ahead of its time, it was beyond its time. Finch is marvelous, conveying quiet dignity along with a childlike neediness and petulance—never pathetic, just a bit lost and sad. A sequence at a bar mitzvah is priceless, with all his pushy female relatives trying to hook him up with a woman. It says more about what Daniel’s growing up must have been like than any number of flashbacks could have done. Glenda Jackson is also fine here, very natural and high-spirited. And Murray Head is certainly attractive as Bob, although I couldn't help but think: what do they see in him? Sunday Bloody Sunday is a thoroughly enjoyable example of early ‘70s spirit.

For those who survive a war, the trauma never completely goes away. Hive, the debut feature of Kosovan writer and director Blerta Basholli, is set in a village in Kosovo in 2006, seven years after the end of the war with Serbia. Many of the women in the village are still waiting to learn the fate of their missing husbands. Serbian paramilitaries and regular troops murdered thousands of civilians in a campaign of terror during that war. The main character in Hive is based on a real person, Fahrije Hoti and is played by a marvelous actress named Yllka Gashi. After much effort and struggle, Fahrije has realized that she can't support her two kids or her disabled father-in-law with her absent husband’s failing honey business. We see her diligently tending the hives and extracting the honey, then straining and bottling it, but the volume is too small to bring in enough money. At local gatherings of the women whose men are missing, Fahrije proposes that they band together to make and sell ajvar, a popular condiment made from red peppers and eggplant. Anticipating the pressure from their conservative families, most of the women don't want to take this chance, and only one of them agrees to work with Fahrije. The older men of the village, patriarchal Muslims, hate when women act independently. Moreover, they assume all the women are widows and believe that it's unseemly for widows to even appear in public. When Fahrije gets a driver's license and starts driving a car in town, delivering jars of ajvar to the market, someone throws a rock through one of her car windows. As time goes on, the men continue to harass her with petty acts of vandalism and aggression. When other women eventually decide to take part in the business, the hostility escalates. Basholli doesn't shrink from revealing how the older traditional ways of rural Kosovo act as a chain around the necks of the women, even when the desperation of trying to make a living in this postwar environment justifies their enterprise. It's just an unfortunate fact about this society, which the film shows us without even really commenting on it. Against this discouraging background we also get to witness the good things that happen when women work together—Basholli depicts the quiet joyfulness of self-sufficient women acting as a community. As counterpoint to the main story about forming a business is the story of Fahrije's daily struggle with grief, still unsure about the fate of her husband, and the tension this causes in the family. Her father-in-law is bitter about losing his son, and gets angry at Fahrije for stirring up controversy in the village. When Fahrije tries to sell her husband's bench saw to help fund the business, her teenage daughter takes it as an insult to her father, whom she of course wants to believe is still alive. All of these are symptoms of unspoken grief, which will endure even if there's resolution. A few weeks ago on this show I reviewed Quo Vadis, Aida? another film about the Balkan wars which, like this one, is directed by a woman. The impact of war crimes and mass murder is a lasting one, as we can see even 23 years after the end of the fighting in the former Yugoslavia. Basholli's style in Hive is not heightened or melodramatic, but sober, gritty and matter-of-fact. Yllka Gashi plays the lead role with admirable seriousness and restraint. Hive is a finely modulated work of grief, and courage.

The classic Harlem Renaissance novel by Ella Larsen about the American delusion of race is beautifully adapted by Rebecca Hall. Passing is a remarkable film about what we used to call the color line, the distinction between races that has permeated American history. It is the debut of Rebecca Hall as director and writer, a gifted actress now going behind the camera. Passing is adapted by Hall from the famous 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen, an important writer in what has come to be called The Harlem Renaissance. In midtown Manhattan, sometime in the 1920s, Irene, a young woman played by Tessa Thompson, furtively enters a fancy hotel, lowering her hat to help conceal her face. Only later do we realize that she's “passing,” on a small scale just in this part of town. “Passing” was when people of color who were light-skinned enough, managed to successfully pretend being white. Irene wouldn't normally be allowed in this hotel. She lives in Harlem, married with two kids. While enjoying a refreshment, she's startled to see someone she knows from her younger days in Chicago—Clare, played by Ruth Negga, laughing and having casual conversations with some white friends. Clare sees Irene, approaches her with affection and invites her to her hotel room for some drinks. Clare has blonde hair and is a good deal lighter skinned than Irene, and after they go up to the room, she reveals that she's totally passing for white in every part of her life, including having a white husband,, and a daughter. We can see that all this produces wonderment in the mind of Irene at her old friend's audacity. Then Clare's husband shows up, astonishingly addressing his wife as “Nig” which he explains is a joke because Clare seems to have gotten darker after the birth of their child. Actually, he says, he hates Negroes, and neither he nor Clare will go near them. Thus begins a suspenseful exploration of the complex structure of racism in the Jim Crow era, which by the way, affected black Americans throughout the country, not just in the South. Nowadays it's just part of life to see people, and actually be people, that look like Irene or Clare, and in general we use the word multiracial. But back then, even if the only person of color in your family tree was a great grandparent, you were to be legally considered a Negro. The racist beliefs of the time meant that one drop of so-called black blood took away your white privileges. I imagine that one of the reasons Rebecca Hall shot this film in black and white is that it makes it easier for a modern audience to believe that Thompson and Negga's characters could pass. And besides the metaphorical angle of “black and white,” it's an opportunity to depict a deeper character study, because black and white photography makes everything seem more subjective, and Hall is mainly interested in the inner drama of what the characters are feeling and thinking. In fact, our point of view character is Tessa Thompson's Irene. The film shows us almost everything that happens through her eyes. When Clare expresses regret at leaving the black community, and starts to visit Irene in Harlem, the uncertainty Clare represents, along with her risky breaking of boundaries, make Irene feel insecure. She desperately wants to believe that her position is not threatened, that her family is safe, and that she can live separately from white society without worry. But Irene's fear comes up to the surface anyway, in the form of jealousy. She is in for a shock. Thompson, Negga, and all the supporting cast are great. The pacing is just right. Passing is a film of rare sensibility—a subtle and nuanced drama of American illusions.

We've all seen commercials, and we know how corporations and businesses promote not only their products but their image—stories that are basically about their own benevolence, with happy consumers served by happily dedicated workers making life better. And let's face it, we all know it's a pitch, a promotional angle, or if not we should know it, and yet we have been bombarded with it for so long that we don't really question it. And so to break through that story with satire, with a sense of humor sharpened by awareness of the truth that is hidden behind the hype, is a rare thing to attempt in a film. But Spanish writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa has just pulled this off in his latest film, a clever dark comedy called The Good Boss. Javier Bardem plays Julio Blanco, the owner of a company that manufactures industrial scales. He's charming and charismatic, and supervises his company with a personal touch, often saying that he sees the employees as his family, and promising to take the time to listen to any problems they may have. Near the beginning of the movie he makes a speech to inspire the workers, informing them that an awards committee will soon visit the factory, and asking them to pull together to make a good impression so that they can win this prestigious award for excellence. Bardem had me smiling and chuckling from the get-go. This guy Blanco is a smooth talker indeed, and a master of pleasant sounding B.S. On some level, of course, he believes his own story, and this is a big part of why Bardem is so funny here. As the film goes on, we see more and more how Blanco's image as the good, caring boss is a calculated strategy for achieving his own ends. There are obstacles in his way. A longtime employee who was recently fired comes in and makes a big fuss, accusing the company of betrayal and demanding his job back. After he's escorted out of the building, he sets up a little camp across from the factory, on public land so he can't be evicted, yelling slogans against Blanco all day, through a bullhorn. What if the awards committee sees this? Blanco has to find a way to make him leave. In addition to this, his director of operations is making lots of expensive mistakes, and the reason he gives is that he can't focus on work because his wife, who also works at the company, is having an affair. The biggest obstacle of all, though, is really Blanco himself, who, while to all appearances happily married, has a roving eye for young attractive female employees. He's gotten away with it so far, but a beautiful intern named Liliana, played by Almudena Amor, could spell trouble. All of these plot threads (and there are more) weave themselves throughout the story to wryly amusing effect. Blanco uses his charm and friendliness, his aura as a good boss, to twist things around for his advantage. But everything starts to fall apart, and it's hilarious to watch him desperately trying to navigate his way out of the mess he has ultimately caused. Implied throughout the film is a sharp critique of the phony mindset, the relentless fake positivity of corporate self-presentation. The Good Boss is ultimately not a farce, but a very measured piece of work, even rather dramatic at times, because the issues at stake are quite real. De Aranoa's writing and direction is very slick and accomplished, and everything fits together perfectly, but the reason it all works so well is Javier Bardem, in a part that showcases this actor's tremendous talent.

There was a minor category of Hollywood films, made between Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in late '41, that I've nicknamed “We Need to Enter the War” films. The American public was largely wary of joining in—the attitude being “let Europe solve its own problems”—but a significant portion of the filmmaking industry wanted people to know about the danger of isolationism. Possibly the best example of this kind of movie is Foreign Correspondent, from 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, himself a recent arrival to Hollywood from England. A brash young reporter (played by Joel McCrea) is sent to Europe on the eve of war to provide a fresh perspective for American readers. He hooks up with a peace organization in Holland, run by the urbane Mr. Fisher (Herbert Marshall), and falls in love with Fisher’s daughter (Laraine Day). When the reporter witnesses the assassination of a Dutch diplomat who was central to the cause of peace, he ends up on the trail of a mysterious organization of spies. It’s easy to forget that the thriller genre didn’t get very much respect until Hitchcock came around. He brought style and dedication to the form, and this particular example is one of the smoothest and most entertaining films of the ‘40s. There are two great set pieces. The assassination scene, in which a man shoots the diplomat during a downpour, then escapes through a sea of umbrellas, is a complex masterwork of editing. It’s soon followed by a sequence in a windmill (Hitchcock had a fondness for staging scenes in such out of the ordinary places) where McCrea manages to slink through the building, escaping the spies’ notice while the inner machinery rotates the blades, the moving camera providing a perfect sense of the spatial relationships in the windmill. What was already a stock situation (good guy hides within earshot of bad guys) is transformed into pure visual pleasure and excitement. One of the more curious aspects of the film is the character played by George Sanders, a suave and witty English reporter who happens to be a friend of Fisher’s daughter, and helps the American reporter solve the mystery. Sanders is great here—in fact, he’s so good that he becomes the film’s hero, playing the key role of daredevil rescuer in the film’s finale, rather than the star McCrea, as Hollywood convention would dictate. Did Hitchcock and his screenwriter Charles Bennett, both British, elevate the English character’s role as some kind of tribute to the mother country, which was under violent siege at the time of filming? I don’t know, but it’s certainly unusual—not that it spoils the fun in any way. Foreign Correspondent ends with a bit of uplifting propaganda, McCrea broadcasting a warning to the rest of the world, and this is perfectly understandable. But its value as entertainment outweighs its political significance, then and now.

French filmmaker Claire Denis, whom I consider one of our greatest living directors, likes to play around with genre from time to time. Her latest picture is called Both Sides of the Blade, and if you read the ad copy it's being called a love triangle. Well, it's like no triangle I've ever seen. In fact, her editing strategies and her masterful use of music make the film seem as if it's going to turn into a scary suspense thriller at any moment. The story starts with Sara and Jean, a middle aged couple blissfully in love, played by Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon. Denis carefully establishes their intimacy in the beginning sequence where they're on vacation together. How satisfying it is to watch a director allowing her actors time to establish convincing, lived-in characters. This is the third time in a row that Binoche has starred in a Denis movie, and also Lindon's third time working with her. Denis' familiarity with her performers pays off with especially fine and nuanced work from these two. Returning to Paris, trouble begins right away when Sara on her way to work happens to see a man (played by Grégoire Colin) on a motorcycle. Later we see her overwhelmed with emotion, out of breath, saying the man's name, François, repeatedly in a tone that sounds more shocked than pleased. She tells Jean later that she saw François, and his reaction is muted. Gradually we learn that François is Sara's ex, and also Jean's former friend, whom neither of them has seen for ten years. A further element of mystery is introduced: Jean has finished serving ten years in prison, and is consequently having trouble finding work. For Denis, a story never happens separately from society or politics or ideas. In this story, Sara is the host of a radio show in which she interviews various figures in progressive and anti-colonial circles. There's no need for viewers to make too much of this—it's another way of establishing characters in a full-bodied fictional world. But it's also a reminder that there are many other things, and much worse problems, than the travails of personal relationships. So, François offers Jean a job. He hesitates, but Sara says it's fine. The private reactions, however, that we've seen her express when seeing François, contradict what she's telling Jean. And thus we embark on what I never thought of as a triangle while watching, because of the peculiar nature of this story. François seems almost like a demonic figure, since we never get inside him like we're allowed to get inside the two leads. Was he responsible in some way for Jean going to prison? What we do see quite vividly is that a duality is at play in Sara's heart, a duality of which she herself is only vaguely aware. The emotional agonies that Sara and Jean put themselves through as the film goes on are the fulfillment of all Denis' suspense film clues. It's especially brilliant in the case of Juliette Binoche, who takes us on a dark journey into some strange complications of desire. The film doesn't answer all our plot questions. It does show how much deeper and more mysterious the relationships between women and men are than we usually care to acknowledge. Both Sides of the Blade presents, in its stylish way, that mystery.

In the history of Indian film, there's a dividing line between approximately the first forty years of the movie industry, and the release, in 1955, of the first film by Bengali writer and director Satyajit Ray. It's called Pather Panchali, which roughly translated into English means Song of the Road. Before Pather Panchali, Indian films adhered to a formula of simplistic melodramas or comedies with songs and dancing—in fact, this is the tradition that still dominates today, albeit in a more sophisticated way, and that has come to be nicknamed Bollywood. Ray worked for ten years as a layout editor at a Calcutta ad agency, but his secret love was cinema. He read all the books and magazines he could find about filmmaking. In 1949, the great French director Jean Renoir arrived in India to make his movie The River, and Ray worked part time for him scouting locations. Renoir encouraged him to pursue his dreams. The following year, Ray put his savings together, got a small loan, borrowed money from his family, and began shooting. Most of his crew had no experience. His cinematographer had never shot a film before. Pather Panchali was adapted from a well-known autobiographical novel, written in 1928 by the Bengali author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. It's about a poor family in rural Bengal around 1910. The family consists of the parents—the father is often away trying desperately to make a living, the mother frets and scolds and feels lonely—a daughter and son, and an elderly aunt. The story is centered on the 6-year-old son, Apu, and his innocent reactions to what goes on around him in his family and village. Watching this film is like peeking into an actual place and time. Little details, like the dragonflies playing on the water, create a sense of place while evoking feelings about events that are happening in the lives of the family. The small incidents that go to make up Apu's life are soul-stirring because of the picture's basic honesty about people. These characters are not idealized. The mother nags, her desire for security getting the better of her compassion. The father is a dreamer whose irresponsibility puts the family at risk. The sister, Durga, a few years older than Apu, steals things. Yet they are also decent, loving people. The mother in particular (in an amazing performance by Karuna Bannerjee, an amateur, as was most of the cast) gains immeasurably in stature as the film progresses. And the figure of the old auntie is very moving—childish and sometimes petulant, she also shows a gentleness and tolerance much needed by the daughter. When Ray couldn’t afford any more film, he used bits of the discarded film ends that were left around at the Calcutta studios. But finally, after a year and a half, he ran out of money and filming stopped. After scrambling for over a year, he managed to receive more funding. Working on a deadline, his friend Ravi Shankar composed the film's musical score in one day. Then it was released—to immediate acclaim and sold-out theaters. It was shown at Cannes and eventually given international distribution. Pather Panchali was the first Indian film to receive worldwide attention. As it turned out, this was the first in a trilogy. The other two films: Aparajito  and Apur Sansar  are excellent as well. They follow Apu into adolescence and adulthood, turning the Apu trilogy into a national cinematic epic with Apu representing the soul of India.

The terror and helplessness of civilians caught in a genocidal war is a reality powerfully captured by Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Žbanić in her film Quo Vadis, Aida? “Quo vadis?” is a Latin phrase that became famous in Christian stories about persecution during the Roman Empire. It basically means “Where are you going?” and it was used as something God would say to a frightened believer. But in this case, the question has an urgently modern import, being posed to a woman named Aida, played by Jasna Đuričić, who faces the most catastrophic threat she could imagine. Aida is a Bosnian teacher, who in 1995 works as a translator for UN forces in the town of Srebrenica, near the Serbian border. After three years of siege, the UN officers assure town officials that the Serbian army will suffer airstrikes if they dare to attack. But when Serbia advances on the city, their promises prove empty, and the population flees to the UN base nearby, which is manned by Dutch forces. They only let a few thousand people into the building, leaving thousands more stranded outside the fence in the heat with no food or water. While continuing to work as a translator between Bosnian civilians and the Dutch UN forces, Aida frantically seeks a way to get her husband and two adult sons out of danger. She knows what the UN officers won't admit, that the promises of the Serbians, led by a war criminal, General Mladić, can't be trusted. Almost every moment in this movie is tense and gripping. The Serbs target men for executions because they suspect all Bosnian men of being fighters in anti-Serbian forces. When General Mladic wants to talk to the UN officers he also asks for some representatives of the people of Srebrenica, and when no one volunteers, Aida suggests her husband, who's a high school principal, as a way of getting him inside the compound. Mladic promises that all the civilians will be transported safely to another town in buses, and the UN people agree. But Aida senses that's not safe, so she hides her husband and sons in various places on the base in a difficult and dangerous effort at evasion. The Serbians arrive at the compound and demand to be let in to check for weapons, and we witness their deplorable and abusive behavior. Žbanić expertly evokes the overwhelming fear of people who are basically at the mercy of their worst enemies. While watching this, I kept thinking of the mistreatment and atrocities we're seeing now in Ukraine. The horrifying atmosphere of total war, which seems distant and abstract when we only hear about it, comes to life minute by minute in this film. The acting is amazing, making you forget that this is a movie and experience something close to the reality of state terrorism in a way that is impossible to forget. The film also shows us the conflict eventually ending, and society returning to what appears to be a more normal condition. Yet there are always those who escape the consequences of their crimes, while the suffering and trauma of their victims remain. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a great and towering indictment of our continued acceptance of violence and war.

Before New Zealand director Peter Jackson became world famous for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, he had a cult following for directing a few horror and zombie films that featured wild special effects and stop-motion animation. Then in 1994, at age 32, Jackson showed that he could handle a movie with wider significance and appeal. That film was Heavenly Creatures, a story based on a notorious murder case from the early 1950s in Christchurch, New Zealand. As was to be the case in all his future work, Jackson wrote the screenplay with his wife, Fran Walsh. This was the film that fascinated me when I first saw it in 1995, and then quickly went to see it again. After the picture establishes its time and place with part of an actual 1954 newsreel about Christchurch, we meet Pauline Rieper, a lonely and painfully self-conscious teenage girl played by 16-year-old newcomer Melanie Lynskey. Her parents and siblings don't understand why Pauline is always so angry and withdrawn, although we in the audience can sense that the difficult and confusing effects of puberty clearly play a role. Ignored by her classmates at a girls' school, and disliked by teachers, Pauline is bewildered about her life, an experience well conveyed through Jackson's bold camera effects and frenetic editing. Then, an English girl arrives at the school, Juliet Hulme, played by the 17-year-old Kate Winslet. Vivacious, imaginative, and boldly rebellious, Juliet immediately captivates Pauline, and reaches out to her in friendship, which the shy girl responds to with all the repressed passion of her soul. Winslet had previously appeared on English TV, but this was her first role in a movie. She and Lynskey give powerful, revelatory performances. The bond between Pauline and Juliet quickly becomes rather intense. Pauline introduces her friend to the music of her idol, the tenor Mario Lanza. Their enmeshment expresses itself in imaginative play-acting: they pretend to be fantasy heroines in a mythical kingdom, giving themselves different names and acting out little stories. Here Jackson introduces his animation techniques—large “claymation” type figures dancing, singing, and embracing the girls in the courtyard of a medieval castle. The girls' fantasies not only celebrate their bond, but express anger and hostility towards authority figures who try to discipline them. The trouble starts when Juliet's father feels disturbed by how involved the two girls are in each other. He thinks it's unhealthy, and he tells Pauline's mother that. Both sets of parents try to discourage the friendship in various ways, but of course this only makes the attachment stronger and more determined. When the Hulmes decide to move back to England, Juliet and Pauline think they're being persecuted. Faced with the unthinkable prospect of separation, their fragile minds go over the edge. Heavenly Creatures is a fever dream of a movie. Sometimes it seems like you can barely catch your breath with Jackson's relentless, flamboyant style, funny at first but ultimately tragic. No film that I've seen has captured the insanity of adolescence, the inability to see a future in the pressure of today, than this film has. Heavenly Creatures' remarkable compassion for its misguided characters brings us to painful and unforgettable awareness.

I recently took a trip on Amtrak that included staying in a sleeping car, and although there were practical reasons for this, my inner movie lover also wanted to experience first hand something like the train journeys I've loved watching in the movies. From Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century through more than one Hitchcock film, to Richard Linkater's Before Sunrise, passenger trains have been a time-honored cinematic tradition. Compartment Number 6, a film from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, takes this classic set-up and gives it a refreshingly intimate turn. We first meet Laura, a young Finnish archaeology student played by Seidi Haarla, at a chic cocktail party in Moscow hosted by a woman we eventually figure out is her lover, a Russian professor named Irina. Laura is about to travel north to the Arctic Circle city of Murmansk to study newly discovered 5000 year-old petroglyphs there, a detail which dates our story to the late 1990s. Laura wants to feel excited about her trip, but she's sad because Irina has decided not to go with her, so that in addition to feeling out of place in Russia as a Finn with a minimal grasp of the language, she senses that Irina is giving the brush-off to her relationship. When Laura gets on the train, she's in for a shock, discovering that she's sharing the tiny compartment with a young Russian mine worker named Ljoha, played by Yuriy Borisov. He's a swaggering, almost illiterate tough guy in the process of trying to get as drunk as possible on vodka while filling the little sleeping car with his cigarette smoke. The conversation does not go well. For some reason he thinks she's Estonian, and makes insulting sexist comments to her. Is she going to have to spend the entire long journey with this creep? She tries to get a different compartment, but the train is full up. Now, if you're thinking in conventional terms, you might wonder if the film's going to make a love story out of this unpromising situation. Thankfully, it doesn't do that, instead carefully and believably depicting a process by which two people gradually allow themselves to recognize each other for who they really are behind their social masks. The chance of friendship and connection is in this case more meaningful than any kind of romance. Kuosmanen shot most of the picture on an actual train, with close-ups vividly communicating the cramped atmosphere inside, a confinement that is set against the winter landscape seen rushing by outside the windows. There are also important scenes that are not on the train, including at Murmansk, where the resolution between these two completely opposite characters is achieved with beautiful understatement. Much of the credit for this is due to the two actors, who convey so much more than expected, revealing that their fears of how other people see them have become an obstacle in their lives. Based on a novel by Finnish author Rosa Liksom, the picture makes fun in a gentle way of the stereotyped differences between Finland and Russia, a subject which is especially interesting in light of current tensions between the two countries. Compartment Number 6 doesn't take anything for granted, but starts at something like square one in human relations and makes something very surprising and worthwhile out of it.

Three films by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass present wordless imagery and music to send a cosmic warning about civilization’s imbalance, exploitation, and destruction. The meanings that we access through works of art are not confined to the conscious intentions of the artists. This critical truth came to mind while watching The Qatsi Trilogy—three films directed by Godfrey Reggio, and scored by Philip Glass. These are films without any talking, just imagery and music. The only text comes at the end, when the odd-sounding film titles are explained. Philip Glass's music is an essential component. It’s not the usual situation where the music accompanies a narrative, or helps illustrate it. The music is united to the visuals as if they were one thing. I know people who are maddened by Glass’s music, which is characterized by a lot of repetition. But here it aligns the viewer’s attention and emotions with the images. The repetitive motifs help the mind let go of the scattered, wandering forms of attention that can be habitual for us. Koyaanisqatsi, from 1982, starts with shots of nature in awe-inspiring aspects: mountains, canyons, deserts, and so on, with human beings conspicuously absent. Eventually we shift to footage of modern civilization, and in comparison to nature these images seem bizarre and outlandish. Two techniques comprise most of the film: slow motion and fast motion. The fast motion is actually time-lapse photography: footage of events that take hours or even days appearing to take place in just minutes. The movement of vehicles, traffic zipping through huge highway systems, masses of people, colossal buildings in major cities and the traffic within those cities: time-lapse photography takes away the familiarity of these things and makes them seem alien. In purely visual terms, the images are astounding, weird, beautiful, yet disturbing. Slow motion is used when we are looking at things more close up, especially people. Watching the movement of a crowd in slow motion, the familiar is once again supplanted by the sensation of strangeness. These beings, in the way they move, the way they avoid each other’s gaze, evoke questions and doubts about human nature, our striving and seeking, our ignorance and mortality. Powaqqatsi, from 1988, refrains from time-lapse photography, but it still uses a lot of slow motion. Here the footage is from the lands of non-European people. First we see traditional forms of work such as planting. Then civilization shows up. Instead of fairly well-dressed folks we see a much poorer populace. Modernity has conquered this non-white world, but it hasn’t helped the people. Here’s the theme of injustice and exploitation, and one’s heart hurts more watching this than it did during the more alienated first film. Naqoyqatsi was released in 2002, after a gap of thirteen years. Why this long delay I don't know. The film uses graphics, animation, and rotoscope photography to visualize the mind realm, the world of thinking and science. The mathematical and geometric designs become like a relentless drum beat of “progress.” Eventually the rhythm becomes the marching of soldiers, the creation of weapons, guns firing and the detonation of bombs. It shows the cleverness of humans serving the expansion of war. One thing that makes The Qatsi Trilogy difficult is that it seeks to evoke the impersonal as the source of meaning in the modern world. This

A spellbinding portrait of an elderly couple in crisis, the wife suffering from dementia, the husband unable to cope, in a film composed entirely in split screen. I felt many strong emotions while watching Vortex, the new film by Gaspar Noé, an Argentine director who lives and works in Paris. As far as what the movie is about, it seems fairly straightforward. An elderly married couple in Paris experiences increasing challenges. The husband is a film scholar with some health issues. The wife is a retired psychiatrist who is sliding into dementia. They have an adult son with his own troubles who doesn't know how to help his father deal with the deteriorating situation. The story sounds very similar to Amour, the Michael Haneke film from 2012, and the way it sometimes highlights how scary dementia can be for the person suffering from it, brings to mind The Father with Anthony Hopkins, directed by Florian Zeller, which was more recent. Those were both great films. But the resemblances are actually kind of superficial. Noé has crafted a formal structure that makes Vortex unique. Almost the entire film is presented in split screen: two motion pictures side by side with borders, like window frames. For a good deal of the time, the husband is on one side, the wife on the other. She wakes up first and starts puttering around the house. Eventually he gets out of bed and goes about the normal business of his day. At first it might seem difficult to follow two images at once—the eye moves from one to the other to try to catch everything. Eventually one gets used to the technique. The man seems relatively lucid and talkative, calling people on the phone about a book he's writing, and so forth. The woman goes out of the apartment and wanders into a couple of shops, and we notice that she becomes more and more tentative, looking lost and puzzled. The split screen encourages us to value both subjective points of view equally, rather than favor one over the other, and I think that's perhaps the most important reason the director chose to do this. The husband's words and behavior are understandable, but we also identify with the wife's fear and bewilderment, such is the incredible performance by Françoise Lebrun as this old woman struggling to find words to express her catastrophic loss of memory in which everything seems strange and somehow wrong. The husband, by the way, is played by the famous horror director Dario Argento. Later, Noé introduces variations in the form. Husband and wife are sometimes in the same room—we still have a split screen where we see them from different angles. When their son comes to help them a little, and brings along his little boy, he replaces one of the points of view in the split screen, or the three of them are together in two different angles. And there are further permutations. The director sticks to this device to both divide and broaden our attention. I suppose any film featuring dementia as a major element might end up being about a lot more. Vortex is thought-provoking in the best sense. We're forced to confront the nature of memory and its relationship to identity, and the fact of mortality, which we so often avoid. In the end, it's not the style or the artfulness that matters here, it's the unsparing honesty. We see how even the most loving among us are so involved in ourselves that we can't fully listen to one another, and we see that gap also in the eyes of the mother looking for some unknown key to explain her distress. The truth is always more compassionate than anything comforting we try to say. Vortex has that kind of compassion.

A splendid adaptation of Balzac’s great novel about a young poet becoming embroiled in the petty world of Paris journalism in the 1820s. Lost Illusions is an adaptation of a classic 19th century novel by Honoré de Balzac. The history of film is full of examples of great books that have failed to be made into good movies, so it's an unexpected delight to see a movie that does justice to its source. Lost Illusions is not only an excellent period drama recreating with its costumes, sets, and production design Paris in the 1820s, but a faithful translation of the vision of its brilliant world-famous author into cinematic terms. It's directed by Xavier Gianolli, the creator of another fine period film, Marguerite, that I reviewed a few years ago; who, with Jacques Fieschi, also adapted Balzac's novel for the screen. The story concerns a naïve provincial poet, Lucien Chardon, played by the perfectly cast young actor Benjamin Voisin, who dreams of escaping the drudgery of his life working at a printing press in his small town by writing and publishing his own poetry. His talent and good looks catch the attention of a local unhappily married noblewoman played by Cécile de France, who, seeking to advance his career ends up having an affair with him. When her infidelity is suspected by her rich husband, she flees to the refuge of her influential aristocratic cousin in Paris, with Lucien in tow. But his immature country manners stick out like a sore thumb in high class Parisian society, and she's forced to abandon him or be ostracized. Faced with poverty and starvation, Lucien luckily falls in with the editor of one of the city's literary journals, and gains a reputation as an acerbic theater critic and satirist. This world of the periodical press reveals itself as ruthlessly cutthroat, ruled only by the desire for money and not for art. The amoral atmosphere and the easy money turns his head, and when he falls in love with an actress from the cheap Boulevard stage, it becomes more and more difficult to navigate the treacherous politics and backbiting of Paris journalism. Balzac was writing about a moment in history when many features of the modern world were being born. The revolution and Napoleon's wars of empire were over; the old Bourbon dynasty had been restored, and a new way of life in which money was the sole value of the social order was taking root. Giannoli paints a meticulous picture of a world in which honesty and noble motives were disdained, when writers paid for good reviews in the paper, or got bad reviews when their enemies paid more. One of the characters organizes groups of audience members who will clap or boo a stage production based on which side has paid him the most money. Royalists and anti-royalists square off in print, and Lucien is clumsy enough to make enemies in both camps. He seeks to be known not by his father's name Chardon, but by the noble pedigree of his mother, de Rubempré. In the end everything comes down to class, and the success or failure of being included in the upper class. The new version of society that Balzac was condemning was ultimately a replay of the same old story of privilege and domination. Full of character and incident, beautifully shot and acted, Lost Illusions is a triumph. Although the film necessarily trims some of the book's subplots, it's a splendid and accurate portrayal of the great French novelist's insights about the corrupting power of money and class. And although it takes place two hundred years ago, one can find many parallels to our time.

Artist and director Ulrike Ottinger presents her recollections of living and working in Paris in the 1960s. Paris Calligrammes: that's not exactly a movie title that would pique everyone's curiosity. It's written and directed by an experimental visual artist and filmmaker named Ulrike Ottinger. I can assure you that she doesn't take appealing to a mass audience into consideration. She makes films for herself and others who are interested in art and creativity for their own sake. Ottinger, who turned 80 this year, tells of her experiences in Paris as a young artist, from the time she left her provincial German town in 1962 at age 20, her car breaking down on the way, after which she hitchhiked to the city. She accompanies her narration with a wealth of footage from home movies, newsreels, TV excerpts, still photos, fiction films, and film of life in Paris today. Different sections highlight different aspects of her Paris experience. She starts with her discovery of the Librairie Calligrammes, a store specializing in German books owned by Fritz Picard, a Jewish German exile. The word “Calligrammes” was taken from a poem by Guillame Apollinaire, who defines it as a text that creates an image with its letters. By using this word as part of the film's title, Ottinger is signaling the same artistic purpose of creating an image in the mind through her narration. Anyway, she discovered this German language book store, and the owner, Picard, opened a door for her to a world of intellectual émigrés, including Hans Richter, Paul Celan, and Walter Mehring, that was centered on Dada and Surrealist art and literature. We see an interview with Picard, and hear Mehring recite a masterful poem mourning the deaths of German artists who resisted fascism. This one section is so full of interesting people and stories that I thought this might be the whole movie. But it's a film of many parts, and although it runs only a little over two hours, it's brimming with so much incident and detail that I can only marvel that Ottinger has managed to fit it all in. Other sections cover her friends among the city's avant-garde visual artists, neighborhoods in which she lived, the vital film scene clustered around Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque Française, Ottinger's own progression as an artist influenced by the Dada and Pop Art movements, the left wing politics that pulled Paris intellectuals together in the late ‘60s (and then pushed them apart), and much more. Ottinger was always openly lesbian, and that reality is taken as an assumed basis here, one of the aspects of her life that informs her work. I found myself stopping the film at times (the great advantage we have in our video era!) to make notes about the film's numerous anecdotes, remarks, and insights. Ottinger doesn't try to attain an illusory comprehensiveness, but just by talking about her own experience, her own world, she provides a sense of the excitement and ferment of that time that I've never seen equaled. I would say that this picture is an example of the diary or notebook form within what I call non-fiction film. The word “documentary” is really tired out now, and fails to do justice to the variety we witness in films that are not narrative or dramatic stories. Ottinger uses archival material with an eye towards what you haven't seen before, avoiding the kind of stock photo montage that we encounter in straight “objective” histories. There's a lot to take in, and I felt intellectually and emotionally enriched after watching it.

An experiment in how people will react to videos of Israeli army and settler interactions with Palestinians becomes a fascinating study challenging assumptions about viewers and their judgments about film and images. Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz made several award-winning documentaries before moving from Israel to Philadelphia four years ago. I remembered him from an interesting 2003 fiction film called James' Journey to Jerusalem, in which a young Jewish African man emigrates to Israel and is surprised by the racism he experiences from other Jews. The theme was serious, but the treatment was low-key, scrupulously respectful of the characters, and often humorous. His documentary work is also compassionate and open-minded. The latest of these, from 2019, is the simplest and at the same time most provocative of Alexandrowicz's films. It's called The Viewing Booth. Alexandrowicz invited seven Temple University students to watch videos of Palestinian interactions with the Israeli military and settlers, about half of the videos by a human rights group, critical of Israeli policy, called B'Tselem, and the other half by various pro-Israel sources. They were encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings while watching. One of the seven students had to cancel, and a young Jewish student named Maia Levi expressed interest in being part of the project, so she ended up filling that slot. It is her experience viewing the videos in a booth that we are first shown. Levi is intelligent, solidly pro-Israel, and expresses a lot of skepticism about the videos. Part of the time we just watch her face as she reacts to the material, and listen to her comments, and eventually we also see what she is being shown. She doesn't accept any video on face value. For example, she says that an official IDF video showing a soldier being nice to a Palestinian kid and giving him a piece of cheese is obviously staged, and that it's an unconvincing and ineffective message. She expresses similar doubts about the B'Tselem videos. How did cameras just happen to be in these situations where we see Israeli soldiers and settlers misbehaving? What is the context of these events, and why aren't we being told about what preceded them? Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz made several award-winning documentaries before moving from Israel to Philadelphia four years ago. I remembered him from an interesting 2003 fiction film called James' Journey to Jerusalem, in which a young Jewish African man emigrates to Israel and is surprised by the racism he experiences from other Jews. The theme was serious, but the treatment was low-key, scrupulously respectful of the characters, and often humorous. His documentary work is also compassionate and open-minded. The latest of these, from 2019, is the simplest and at the same time most provocative of Alexandrowicz's films. It's called The Viewing Booth. Alexandrowicz invited seven Temple University students to watch videos of Palestinian interactions with the Israeli military and settlers, about half of the videos by a human rights group, critical of Israeli policy, called B'Tselem, and the other half by various pro-Israel sources. They were encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings while watching. One of the seven students had to cancel, and a young Jewish student named Maia Levi expressed interest in being part of the project, so she ended up filling that slot. It is her experience viewing the videos in a booth that we are first shown. Levi is intelligent, solidly pro-Israel, and expresses a lot of skepticism about the videos. Part of the time we just watch her face as she reacts to the material, and listen to he

Guillermo del Toro adds his own Gothic sensibility to this thrilling new version of an old film noir. After winning the Best Picture Oscar in 2017 for The Shape of Water, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro continues to challenge himself. Turning aside from his customary monster or supernatural-themed stories, he's now made a crime film, a film noir as people often call it, Nightmare Alley. Hollywood already released a picture with that title back in 1947, starring Tyrone Power, and it's a good one, but rather than do a remake, Del Toro went back to the original 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, which includes a lot of material that was changed or not used for the older film. And being the stylist that he is, Del Toro has made a movie of intense visual richness, a dark thriller that grabs the viewer every step of the way. Bradley Cooper plays a cunning grifter named Stanton Carlisle, whom we first see dragging what is clearly a wrapped up dead body into a hole in the floor of a run-down shack, setting it on fire, then walking away while the fire engulfs the house. It's the late 1930s. On the run, Stan stumbles into a traveling circus, and is hired by the owner and operator, played by Willem Dafoe, as an assistant and maintenance guy. He makes friends with a mentalist act, a husband and wife team played by David Strathairn and Toni Collette, who teach him some of their tricks. He also hooks up with Molly, a sideshow performer played by Rooney Mara, and persuades her to go off with him and embark on their own career as a mentalist act, pretending to read minds and reveal secrets on stage and in nightclubs. But then a femme fatale, a psychiatrist played by Cate Blanchett, gets him involved in a much more high-stakes scheme. Del Toro loves classic studio-era Hollywood film, to which he's added his own heady mix of gothic symbolism and mystery. He's great at making movies that are made completely on sets, or almost completely. That old style of cinematic illusion in which production design, music, and smooth camera work seduces an audience into its world is a perfect match for this director's talent. As a viewer, I reveled in the artifice of his presentation, the knowledge that this is a movie not detracting one bit from the enjoyment of its style. The film is constantly startling us with vivid tracking shots, close-ups of its often grotesque characters, and unusual camera angles. Nathan Johnson's music provides an ominous undercurrent to the tale of twisted ambition spinning out of control. Bradley Cooper really takes it to the limit—this is among his best work yet, a maniacal yet self-contained portrait of a man always grasping for more. Rooney Mara represents a balancing force, an essentially innocent person tricked into crossing ethical boundaries because of her love for Stan. She's the perfect counterpart to Cooper's intensity. A lot of mainstream filmmaking is merely competent at best, not going out of its way to challenge an audience, but tamely imitating all the other stuff out there. Guillermo del Toro is different. With Nightmare Alley, he demonstrates his commitment to continue making terrifically entertaining movies.

An increasingly synthetic world creates the conditions for new human organs of unknown purpose to appear in the body, in David Cronenberg’s latest dystopian vision. David Cronenberg pioneered a certain type of horror movie that came to be called “body horror.” Throughout his career, in such films as The Brood, Videodrome, and The Fly, he's told stories that involve invasion, mutation, and experimentation of the human body. But even this notion of body horror is too narrow.  It's not about just fright or being scary, but a feeling of strangeness about being embodied itself. Human beings have altered the world in many ways, including ways that are bad, and in so doing, Cronenberg is saying, we also alter ourselves. Each of his films with this theme has reflected on the society and the era we are living in. With his new film, Crimes of the Future, he confronts us with the deadly poisoning of our environment, in a film of radical pessimism. Cronenberg made a film called Crimes of the Future back in 1970, with a story that involved mutations, but otherwise is nothing like this new one. It's not a remake or a sequel. I think he just likes the title, which implies crimes as inevitably following what has been done in our past and can't be revoked. This movie takes place in a future dystopia where medical advances have eliminated physical pain from human life. You might think that this would be a good thing, but one of the effects has been to make people more heedless of danger. Many are discovering that new organs are growing in their bodies, organs of unknown function created by some sudden process of evolution. Most, afraid of what may come, choose surgery to remove these organs. In this future, surgery has become almost thoroughly automated, with machines that make all the incisions and extractions just by someone touching a few buttons. And patients are awake during the process, since they can't feel any pain. Viggo Mortensen plays a man named Saul Tenser, who is continually growing new organs and has turned the operations into performance art. His partner, a surgeon played by Lea Seydoux, performs these operations in public where people gaze in fascination at whatever new organs she removes from Tenser's body. He's agreed to let a small research group, called the National Organ Registry, classify and keep track of all these organs, but this causes trouble when their work comes to the attention of a rogue scientist who wants to do a public performance of an autopsy on his dead mutated child. Cronenberg's view of our current situation is an extremely dark one, as you can tell. If you are grossed out easily by blood and guts and people getting cut up, by no means should you see this movie. Nonetheless, the film is not intended merely to shock. In a seductive, almost hypnotic style, and aided by Howard Shore's ominous music, Cronenberg sends us a warning about our reshaping of the world, physically, morally, and politically. The near future we are shown here is in thrall to a sinister death cult. With the attainment of spiritual numbness, humans have succumbed to a kind of despair in which they'll go to any lengths just to feel something, and especially pain. Saul Tenser uses a bizarre technological chair and bed that manipulate his body to keep him alive. These devices sustain, but also enslave him. The film reminds us that an immersion in the virtual represents estrangement from the natural. Crimes of the Future is itself a kind of autopsy of our world predicament, a vision of solemn and unrelenting dread.

Three stories about chance and imagination, written and directed by the up and coming director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. What an intriguing movie title! I can understand how the film's writer and director, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, would be pleased with that translation. However, the literal meaning from the Japanese might give you a better idea of what the movie's about: “Chance and Imagination.” The film consists of three stories, all of which have coincidences, and explore how imagination plays a big part in relationships. Other elements I see here are mistakes and forgiveness. The first story is about a young woman who tells a girl friend about a fascinating man that she just met, and that she spent an entire night in conversation with, everything clicking perfectly, and now they're going to go on a formal date soon. The friend doesn't let on, but from the woman's description she's pretty sure that this man is her ex. She goes to see him, and the tension-filled encounter tells us about a lot of things one would not suspect, and explores some harsh and uncomfortable truths. The second story starts with a young man who fails to graduate because of a professor who refuses to accept a late assignment. This teacher has become suddenly famous after writing an award-winning novel. The young man persuades his girlfriend to try to lure the professor into a “honey trap” for revenge, coming on to him so that he'll be disgraced for being sexually inappropriate. Things get complicated, though. The final story concerns a woman feeling alienated when she attends a high school reunion. She leaves the reunion, and then by chance runs into a former lover. The other woman invites her over for tea, and the stage is set for some revelations about the past. There's a clever twist in the plot that I won't tell you. I'll only say that the two women use their imaginations to recreate memories and heal their wounds. The first story ends with uncertainty, the second with bitter irony, and the third with an affirmation of going forward in life. On the soundtrack is a solo piano piece by Robert Schumann: “Scenes of Childhood.” It conveys a mood of wistfulness, even a little sentimentality, so I thought I might be in for something emotionally precious or pretentious. It turns out to be a nice fake move: if the music sets you up to be touched, the hard-edged honesty of the dialogue and the daring ups and downs in the characters' perceptions of events provide a bracing little shock to the system. The second story features the reading of a passage from the professor's book that seems frankly pornographic, just to warn you. The intention, I think, is to make you laugh, or at least that's what I did. I was continually surprised by the insights that emerged from these stories of chance and mistaken assumptions. Hamaguchi released this film and another one, the critically acclaimed Drive My Car, both in one year, which is quite an accomplishment. I think I’m probably in a minority in preferring this film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, to the other one. Hamaguchi wrote the three stories here, and so his style, in my opinion, suits his own material in this case more than Drive My Car, which is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, whose unusual prose manner is, in my view, difficult to adapt. Now, don't get me wrong; it's a good movie. It's just that Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy captured my imagination in a way that still resonates strongly with me.

George Orwell’s dystopian novel was made into a great film in the year of its title: 1984. I'm guessing most of you have at least heard of George Orwell's novel “1984.” It's about a totalitarian state in the future, one of constant surveillance, in which critical thinking is a crime, and authority is represented by a dictator named Big Brother. An office worker in one of the ministries, Winston Smith, starts to question authority, and initiates a secret love affair with a woman named Julia, even though unsanctioned relationships are illegal. This is the plot, in brief, but perhaps the book has become so familiar that we've neglected to read it carefully anymore. Crucially, Orwell's ideas hinged on language and the way authoritarians use it to hide and distort the facts. Making a good film version of 1984 is difficult. It's been tried a few times, with varied success. My favorite version was released in 1984, adapted and directed by a young Englishman named Michael Radford. Radford's producers and other backers were behind his project, but they insisted that the picture be released in the year 1984, when the media would inevitably start talking about the book, comparing what it said to what the year looked like now, and so forth. That meant they were in a hurry to get it done, and it's impressive what Radford and his team, under pressure, managed to achieve on a pretty low budget. The screenplay was very faithful to the book. The director's first brilliant decision was to make the production design appear, not like some vision of the future, but similar to the styles of the year the book was written, 1948. There are computer, surveillance, and television screens in the film, but all the technology looks shabby and old-fashioned. The vehicles, the offices and other buildings, the clothes, look bleak, like England did after the war. Roger Deakins, early in what would become a very long career, paints the film in stark gray—a world of grime and confinement. The color photography sometimes looks almost black and white. All the amazing visual effects, such as the crowd scenes at the hate rallies with the large screens and the image of Big Brother, were done in camera—in other words, they were shot just as they appear. Of course there was no computer generated imagery then, but Radford couldn't even afford the current technology such as blue screens. In the main role of Winston Smith, Radford cast John Hurt, who conveys a kind of wounded resentment and passivity that gives an edge to the character's rebellion. The terrible punishment Winston endures Hurt makes palpable—his suffering has a visceral onscreen power. He truly went the extra mile. As Julia, a relative newcomer named Suzanna Hamilton has just the right mix of mischief and defiant strength. But the biggest coup was getting Richard Burton to play O'Brien, the drily sinister official who represents the intellectual voice of the state machine. He was not a well man, and had trouble remembering his lines. This caused some agonizing delays in the shoot. But the final result on screen is utterly compelling, one of his great performances. Instead of trying to act the villain as a lesser performer would do, Burton's calm and deliberate manner, and the precision and thoughtfulness of his delivery, turns O'Brien into the epitome of totalitarian thinking. It was his last appearance on screen. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage two months before the movie was released. 1984 did OK at the time—not a big hit. Since then, however, its stature has steadily increased, and now it's widely considered the best film version of Orwell's great, still relevant book.

The film version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical is a delightful expression of solidarity in a predominately Latino N.Y. neighborhood, with the group dancing especially enjoyable. Have you seen In the Heights? This is the sort of question I feel compelled to ask after I've watched a film I consider amazing, and possibly of wide appeal. In the Heights is an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the genius behind Hamilton; and the book, as the non-singing part of a musical is called, by Quiara Alegria Hudes. The director is Jon M. Chu. It played on the big screen last year, but I wasn't going out to see movies in theaters yet, so I saw it recently online. Oh, and another reason I'm curious if people have seen it is that in Hollywood terms, it was a flop, making significantly less money than it cost. This doesn't usually surprise me, but In the Heights is not the usual type of film that I review. The story concerns a group of people in the predominately Latino Washington Heights neighborhood in upper Manhattan. At the center are two couples. There's Usnavi, played by Anthony Ramos, owner of a convenience store, or bodega as it's called, yearning to go back to the Dominican Republic where he was born, and intending to buy his deceased father's property there. He has a desperate crush on Vanessa, played by Melissa Barrera, who works in a beauty salon, but wants to get out of the neighborhood and become a fashion designer. Nina, played by Leslie Grace, is a brilliant young Puerto Rican woman returning to the Heights from her first year at Stanford. She felt alienated in that predominately Anglo environment, and would rather come back to live in the Heights, but her father (Jimmy Smits) expects and demands that she stay in school. Benny, played by Corey Hawkins, works for the father's taxi company as a dispatcher, is best friends with Usnavi, and in love with Nina, supporting her in her desire to stay in New York. Around these people are many others: family, friends, and neighborhood characters. The music is what I would call, in my relative ignorance, mainstream hip-hop inflected pop music. Anyway, this kind of music is not really my thing, but it's a remarkable measure of quality, I think, that I find the songs lovely and quite pleasurable, both musically and lyrically. But the thing that knocked me out is the group dancing. Almost every number ends up involving the neighborhood, with a whole bunch of people singing and dancing, joyously and with great energy. The choreography, credited to Christopher Scott, is spectacular. The film idealizes life in the neighborhood, which is something musicals do. It's a heightened reality that we see and hear, and I found it utterly delightful. Being released during the pandemic probably hurt it more than anything, I imagine, although in general audiences today are not too crazy about musicals. Spielberg's version of West Side Story, for instance, also didn't get the box office that was expected. Now, in this film there was also a bit of controversy when Washington Heights residents and others objected to the fact that, other than Benny, the important characters are not black. I don't mean racially, but in terms of color. A vast majority of people in the Heights are black or dark brown in appearance. This complaint is understandable, especially from people who find themselves underrepresented in a film that is titled after their home. Manuel and the other filmmakers have admitted that it was an unintentional screw-up. Knowing nothing about Washington Heights, I absorbed its strong message of solidarity without a problem. The real main character in this fil

Fritz Lang adapted the medieval German epic into this awe-inspiring two part spectacle, one of the great achievements of the silent film era. After the success of the massive two-part crime film Dr. Mabuse in 1922, Fritz Lang and screenwriter Thea von Harbou, now husband and wife, embarked on an even more ambitious project, an adaptation of the German national epic Die Nibelungen. Two years were spent in preparation, and shooting took nine months, which was a huge amount of time to make a film in those days. Once again, the result was a two-part film. Part One (Siegfried) tells of the warrior Siegfried’s wooing of the Burgundian princess Kriemhild, his services to her brother King Gunther in winning the warrior queen Brunhild, and his betrayal and death through the spite of Brunhild and the machinations of the King’s favorite knight, Hagen. Part Two (Kriemhild’s Revenge) tells of Kriemhild’s marriage to the barbarian king Etzel, and how she lures her brothers and Hagen to her court in Hungary in order to exact a bloody revenge for the death of Siegfried. Those familiar with the 12th century poem will notice that the film is almost totally faithful to its source. With only minor added dramatic flourishes, Lang and von Harbou succeeded in transforming the entire story, with its major and minor characters, into a magnificent visual spectacle. Most importantly, the picture recreates the awesome, elemental feeling of the epic, through an astonishing production design and a brilliant dramatic and visual strategy emphasizing the story’s mythic elements through monumentalism and highly stylized acting. The two parts combined have a running time of almost five hours, but the movie is never dull. At this point, Lang knew how to tell a story primarily through images—gone are the lengthy intertitles that plagued Dr. Mabuse. The huge sets have an abstract quality that aids the picture’s mythic, timeless mood. Every scene is carefully composed to convey a particular spatial sense. It’s amazing how Lang is able to make the material dramatic without ever shrinking the characters into mere individuals who have motives or psychology. These are larger-than-life emblems of human passion and struggle, and yet the film’s dynamism maintains its spell, keeping the action gripping and involving. The actors were somehow coaxed into performances that matched their gigantic surroundings. Best is Margarete Schön as Kriemhild, especially in her later incarnation as avenging angel, when she is positively scary. Die Nibelungen has had a controversial reputation among film critics and historians, some of whom see it as an example of a “fascist” style in filmmaking. But this is a tragic story where greed and envy lead to crime, which then leads to a cycle of vengeance that destroys everyone—hardly the celebration of victory that a nationalist ideology would be looking for. This film is truly one of the most impressive achievements of the silent era—an unforgettable, spellbinding experience.

Celine Sciamma’s fairy tale-like film, presented as matter of fact, presents the fulfillment of a little girl’s desire to know what her mother was like when she was a girl. French writer-director Céline Sciamma has followed up her big success from 2019, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with a surprising story of childhood, called Petite Maman. Sometimes simplicity is a radical choice, and Sciamma, who is fond of exploring new frontiers in feminist cinema, presents a vision of young girls and mothers with a sense of beauty and rightness that seems almost too easy, until you stop to consider the delicate artistry that it took to make the film. We first see eight-year-old Nellie helping an old lady with a crossword puzzle. When the girl leaves the room, we see that she's in a nursing home. As she passes a couple of rooms she says goodbye to the women living in them. In the fourth room is her mother, packing everything up. Only later does it occur to us that the lady in the first scene was Nelly's grandmother, whom she was named after. Sciamma has telescoped the time scheme and now the grandmother has recently died. The mother, Marion, is stricken and quiet with grief. They go to the grandmother's old house in the country to join Nelly's father, who is helping Marion clean up the house and pack everything up. Marion grew up in this house. She finds old notebooks with writings from when she was a girl. Nelly wants to know what it was like then, and her mother tells her a few things, including the story of a little hut she built in the nearby woods where she would go sometimes. But the grief makes her pretty closed mouth about the past right now. Nelly asks her father if he knew about the hut, but he says Marion never told him. Then, mysteriously, one morning, the mother has gone away, without saying goodbye, leaving Nelly alone in the house with her father. His explanation is that she just needed to be alone for awhile. Later, wandering in the nearby woods by herself, Nelly sees a little girl dragging a rather large tree branch. Silently, she helps the girl drag the branch further into the woods, and lo and behold, there are the beginnings of a hut. The strange girl, who looks a great deal like Nelly, invites her to her house nearby. When they get to the gate leading to the little yard, Nelly sees that the house looks exactly the same as the house she just came from. The indoors has the same plan and features too. “What's your name?” she asks the other girl. “Marion,” she says. Is what we think is happening here actually happening? The fairy tale-like  concept is so simple that I resisted it at first. In fact, Sciamma does not resort to any magic formula. The only spell, really, is Nelly's desire to know what her mother's girlhood was like. Sure enough, at the new house she meets the girl's mother who is named Nelly and has a limp just like her  grandmother did. But the point of all this is not to dazzle us with any Twilight Zone-type effects. Instead everything is very plain, straightforward, and matter of fact. Much of the film's beauty is attributable to the two child actresses, who are sisters, Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz. They are serious and thoughtful, even when playing together. Sciamma has elicited utterly natural performances from them. The idea, the film's point, if you will, is felt intuitively, and represents a deep connection that a girl has with her mother, in this case a loving mother, and the need to bond with the girl the mother used to be. And it's also very much about girls' relationships with other girls. Beautifully shot and edited, with a brilliant sound design and color scheme, Petite Maman is a blissfully moving experience.

Victor Kossakovsky shows us the experience of farm animals without the mediation of human words and concepts, in a film that extends compassion to life other than our own. The amazing advancements in cinematic technology in recent decades include cameras and sound equipment that can give us sound and image close-up from a long distance, as well as small and portable devices for ground level shots. One of the benefits of these new tools is the ability to make films about animals that eliminate interference from the presence of humans to a remarkable degree. Nothing I've seen exemplifies this advantage better than Gunda, a film by Russian director Victor Kossakovsky, released in 2020. Gunda is the name of a large and impressive looking sow with a litter of twelve piglets, that we see living in a farm environment. The movie doesn't tell us that that's her name, but I learned it from reading about the film later. In fact, there is no narration in Gunda, no explanatory text, no music, no language or voices, no human beings at all. For the entire film, at least before the end credits, we only observe Gunda and her litter, as well as some free range chickens and cows. The gorgeously crisp photography is in black and white. In my view, black and white more vividly conveys subjective states. Whether or not that was the reason for using it, black and white suits the film's message perfectly. In the long opening sequence, the mother pig sleeps, and gradually we see the piglets emerging from behind her in the doorway of her open pen. The process begins by which the little ones feed from their mother's milk. There are enough nipples for all of them, but it takes time for each adorable baby to find one, as they crawl on top and between one another. We are at ground or eye level with them, as we are for most of the film, not looking down at them from a human point of view, but right in there among them. The time for animals is at a different pace than what we have accustomed ourselves to. The mother wakes up, shifts her body, helps the babies to access her as best she can, and it takes time, time for the experience of being an animal. Later we observe chickens, released from a cage by an offscreen presence slowly emerging into a field with woods where they slowly and very carefully explore the terrain. They too, have the force of personality, the character of beings purposely seeking their needs. One of the chickens gets around on only one leg, and quite well, I must say. Later, Kossakovsky shows us a herd of cows. We look in their eyes, observe their interactions with one another, including helping to swat away flies with their tails, and they too display their personhood. The Lakota speak of animals as people: for example, the “four-legged people” or the “winged people.” That's what this film does as well. We are made to see these beings' lives as sufficient and meaningful, apart from any consideration of how they could be of use to us. When we return to Gunda and her litter, the piglets have gotten bigger and more playful as she leads them around the yard. I said before that there are no humans. Towards the end, we do see a large farm vehicle drive up, but we don't see the people driving it. The movie doesn't show us animals being slaughtered or treated cruelly, and we don't hear that either. Yet the film, and especially the ending, has an unforgettable impact. With pure visuals it makes the best case against eating animals I've ever seen. Gunda is a beautiful work that conveys to us, without any preaching, the absolute unity of life.

In his first western, Tom Hanks plays an itinerant news reader from Texas who tries to transport a young girl who was an Indian captive to her relatives. The traditional conventions of the western presuppose a lot of assumptions about America that we've since learned are untrue or at least are much more complex. English director Paul Greengrass, now established as a prominent Hollywood filmmaker, has crafted a western that emphasizes different aspects of the West than we're used to—based on a Paulette Giles novel and starring Tom Hanks, it's called News of the World. The title comes from an interesting premise. Hanks plays a Civil War veteran, Captain Jefferson Kidd, who scrapes together a tenuous living by going from town to town, reading stories from national newspapers to public gatherings, for which he charges a dime a person. I immediately wondered if this was a real thing that people did back then, and it turns out that it is. There was a real Captain Kidd, one of the author's ancestors, who did just that. Americans in isolated western towns didn't have much opportunity to learn what was happening in other places or nationally. Hanks's character has a clear and simple delivery; he's providing an education, but he lends the reading enough drama to make it entertaining as well. We then see the Captain on the road in Texas, where by chance he finds a little white girl hiding in an overturned wagon, but only speaking Kiowa. Eventually he pieces together the truth: she was taken by the Indian tribe after her parents were killed. Now this is one case where an old western theme is being employed. There were Indian captivities, but the consensus now is that they became famous beyond their frequency, which means, in other words, that the captivity stories were sensationalized. In this film it's a plot element that is not lent much resonance. In any case, the girl, Johanna, played by 11-year-old Helena Zengel, thinks of herself as Kiowa, doesn't want to be taken into white society, and is suspicious of Captain Kidd. He tries to get her turned over to authorities, but meeting resistance, decides to take the girl himself to her surviving relatives in southeast Texas. He's a fundamentally decent person, which we expect from a Tom Hanks character, but the film wisely places his decency in the context of war weariness and regret—he seems to have left a wife in San Antonio, under dark circumstances that we don't learn about until later. As the Captain and the young girl travel together, they encounter serious threats, from some ex-soldiers who want to buy the girl from the Captain, and from a racist outlaw officer basically running a Texas county on behalf of his gang—a menacing situation when he takes a dislike to Kidd. The vision of the West presented by News of the World is of a very dangerous place in which men's worst instincts come to the fore. This isn't a time of romance or glory or even the pioneer spirit—this is a painful and difficult time. And it gives the film a dark edge, but the remarkable aspect is how Kidd gradually makes the girl feel safe, and in the process starts to have parental-like feelings for her, feelings of which he is only partly conscious. I tried to remember some other western with Tom Hanks, and I couldn't, because it turns out that this is his first western. His personality fits so well into the genre that it seems as if he's been acting in them for years. He's worked with Greengrass before, as another captain, Captain Phillips, and just like in that movie, the director displays a talent for depicting people in extreme situations. In News of the World he gives us some tense and exciting scenes—this is someone who also directed a

A new film from the West African nation of Ivory Coast presents an intriguing allegory about power and its misuse. Night of the Kings, the second narrative feature of Ivorian director Philippe Lacôte attracted critical notice, and won the Amplify Voices award for films from smaller countries at the Toronto Film Festival. A huge prison in the middle of the rain forest has been abandoned by the state—the warden and his staff oversee the convicts from a sealed room, while the penitentiary is run by the inmates, a hell on earth in which only the strong and the cunning can survive. This society in miniature has developed its own political traditions. One inmate rules them all, but if he becomes unwell, the rules say he must take his own life. The current ruler is a burly old man nicknamed Blackbeard and played by Steve Tientcheu. Blackbeard is clearly ailing—he has an oxygen tank to help him breathe—and he knows there are adversaries trying to take him down. When he notices a new young inmate, played by Bakari Koné, being admitted to the prison, he decides to use him in a bid to gain time. An old prison tradition says that during a period when the moon turns red, the ruler can declare a man “Roman,” or storyteller. The Roman must tell the gathered prisoners tales all night, or face death, and in the meantime Blackbeard will take steps to undo his enemies. If you didn't realize that we were in the realm of myth before this, you will now with this fanciful but evocative narrative ploy. Immediately one thinks of the Arabian nights, and the framing story of Scheherazade, who must keep telling stories or face being executed by her tyrannical monarch of a husband. As it happens, the moon appears red after a spectacular sunset, and the new Roman is called upon to start his tale. He says he doesn't know how to tell stories, but when the inmates are all gathered, he nervously starts talking anyway. He tells of Zama King, a recently killed crime lord in the slums of the capital, a person everyone has heard of and whom he claims to have known. But realizing that he must talk all night, he invents a complex origin story in which Zama King was born and raised in a previous century, as a child in the pre-colonial era when a powerful queen ruled the land. Roman must stretch the story until daybreak, after which he will be safe from being killed. The story expands to include multiple meanings, not least of which concerns the trauma of the recent five year civil war, which audiences in Ivory Coast would remember, but not foreign viewers. Never mind, the metaphor is relevant to all people suffering from the aftermath of war, and to all suffering under autocratic regimes like the one in the prison. In Night of the Kings, the modern and the mythic are one, reflecting the universal stories of power and corruption that plague mankind. The film is also a tribute to the tradition of the west African griot, the storyteller, poet, and musician who passes on the myth, history, and traditions of the people. As Roman speaks, he is often accompanied by the songs, pantomimes and dances of other prisoners. And the film takes us away momentarily from the prison, as we are shown scenes from the drama of Zama King. As the dawn approaches, and Blackbeard's enemies gird for the final struggle, Night of the Kings takes on the nature of legend, a national epic played out in the world of society's most powerless members. This astonishing film confronts us with the fearful consequences of a society ruled by brute force instead of love.

A screenwriter couple’s stay on Ingmar Bergman’s home island of Fårö inspires an honest look at how women are represented in movies, in the latest thoughtful film from Mia Hansen-Løve. French director Mia Hansen-Løve is a real cinephile. She loves to think and talk about film history and the works of famous filmmakers. Although she's partly of Danish heritage, she grew up in France. Even so, she's been influenced, like so many others, by the films of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Like him, she often examines relationships between the sexes, and conflicts in personal life. Unlike Bergman, her films generally avoid heightened dramatic events. Instead she focuses steadily on everyday life, and the ordinary changes occurring in people's emotions and viewpoints over time. She also likes to portray the inner lives of women, although not exclusively. This comparison and contrast with Bergman has resulted in her latest film, entitled Bergman Island. It concerns two screenwriters, who also happen to be a couple, Chris and Tony, played by Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth. They've decided to visit Fårö, the island off the coast of Sweden where Bergman had lived, renting a little house and hoping that being there for a few weeks will inspire them to finish their separate screenplays. Hansen-Løve and her two lead actors deftly portray the mundane details of getting used to a new vacation place, with Roth in particular showing how relaxed and believably casual a performer he can be. They decide to watch a Bergman film, settling on Cries and Whispers, and the experience, as you might expect if you're familiar with that movie, is intense. Krieps's character, Chris, is especially conflicted. She comprehends the great artistry, but doesn't really like the way Bergman portrays women. As the film goes on, we start to understand that Hansen-Løve intends to present us with an alternative version of how women might more realistically behave than in a Bergman film. It's a clever strategy in which she honors the famous director while criticizing him through her own different stylistic choices. But soon it stops being a commentary on Bergman and goes in its own direction. The film's centerpiece occurs when she asks Tony to listen to her ideas about where to go with her screenplay. As she narrates, we are taken to a film within the film, starring Mia Wasikowska as a filmmaker who runs into an old lover on Fårö that she broke up with long ago and had children with someone else, but then finds the sparks flying between them again. Where does life end and art begin? Of course there are echoes of Chris's relationship with Tony, hints of trouble in their intimacy, but the correspondence is not exact. There's quite a bit of humor around the way Bergman has been commodified on the island. Roth's character even goes on what they call a “Bergman safari,” a bus tour to various sites of Bergman films. This is a real thing. Hansen-Løve's sly regard for the commercialized aspect of film is endearing. Her movie, Bergman Island, is more than just a treat for cinephiles, though; it's a provocative look at the way women could be, should be portrayed in film, and preferably by women directors. It's both a challenge and a delight.

Paul Thomas Anderson pays humorous tribute to the 1970s in southern California in this story of a teenage entrepreneur who falls for a clever young woman. The latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson shows the writer-director returning to a favorite place and time: southern California in the 1970s. Boogie Nights in '97, and more recently, Inherent Vice in 2014, celebrated that unusual period in humorous, gently satiric ways. The new movie is called Licorice Pizza, and in some ways, it's Anderson's most outright comic film. In his screen debut, Cooper Hoffman plays 15-year-old aspiring actor Gary Valentine, a high school student in the San Fernando Valley in 1973. He's a goofy red-headed kid, a little overweight, who for some reason has developed amazing self-confidence. He thinks he's going somewhere, and he's full of ideas about how to get there. On the day when class pictures are being taken at the school, he sees a young woman, a photographer's assistant named Alana Kane, played by the similarly named Alana Haim, also in her first film. Gary is immediately love-struck, and decides that Alana is going to be his girlfriend someday, and he quite boldly tells her this. She brushes him off and says she's 25, too old for him, but this awkward yet assertive girl with a wise guy attitude is secretly flattered by Gary's devotion. They do become friends, and work together on Gary's schemes, including one in which he tries to get in on the recent waterbed craze. But the friendship is founded on her stubborn insistence, and eventually his as well, that they're not really a couple at all. Now, one of the characteristics of Anderson's films is that he doesn't care about social proprieties. He likes to makes film about subjects that other people avoid, such as the pornography industry, weird cults, gambling, drugs, you name it. In this case it isn't at all clear to me that Alana is 25. She says she is, but she lives with her parents and sisters, and her father treats her like a teenager. Be that as it may, the director is interested in the dynamic of an absurdly confident boy falling for an older girl. And this is a personal work for him. Cooper Hoffman, who's actually 18, is the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, a close friend of Anderson's who appeared in five of his movies. Alana Haim is a musician in a group with her sisters, that is called Haim. Anderson is a fan and has previously directed several of their music videos. Anderson's humor goes on some strange tangents, not all of which work, but the picture is as good as it is primarily because of Alana Haim. Her character is clearly immature, but she plays at being grown up with complete conviction, while her unacknowledged needs are always leaking through. It's a marvelous performance, consistently funny and engaging. Haim carries the movie with apparent ease. The picture has a kind of splashy “anything goes” style, with Anderson's signature sweeping camera movements and great use of background music. There are good parts for some familiar people: Sean Penn, Tom Waits, and especially Bradley Cooper, insanely funny as an unhinged film producer. But most of all, watch the film for Alana Haim. She's the real deal. Oh, and about that title: “Licorice pizza” was SoCal slang for a vinyl record, and it became the name of a popular chain of LA-area record stores. The film doesn't tell us any of this. I had to Google it to find out. But I think Anderson named his film Licorice Pizza as a way to sum up the ‘70s in his home state. Like the film, it's an affectionate joke.

Todd Haynes tells the story of this influential New York rock band in the cinematic style of the man who discovered them: Andy Warhol. I'm always interested when a film about a favorite rock band comes out. The Velvet Underground, a documentary about the group that enjoyed brief but unprofitable fame in the 1960s, has the added advantage of coming from a favorite director, Todd Haynes. And, I was not disappointed. The story begins with two musical artists toiling in relative obscurity. Lou Reed, a Jewish kid from Long Island who played in a doo-wop band in high school, and wrote songs while at college in Syracuse, had started taking drugs in his teens. He'd been in a psych hospital at one point, and his songs reflected dark themes of alienation, addiction, and bisexuality. Then there was John Cale, a young composer and multi-instrumentalist from Wales, who traveled to New York City to be part of the downtown music scene, and met Reed when the latter was working as a songwriter for a recording company. Cale's experimental style mixed well with Reed's dark songwriting. They added Reed's college friend Sterling Morrison on guitar, and Maureen Tucker, the sister of another Syracuse friend, on drums, and called themselves The Velvet Underground. They were playing in a bar when someone who knew Andy Warhol saw them. Warhol came himself to listen, and put some of his cultural weight in to give them more attention. Later, when a beautiful singer and model from Germany with the stage name “Nico” showed up at Warhol's art factory, he persuaded the Velvet Underground to make her a part of the group. They recorded an album on Verve Records, with Warhol's painting of a banana on the cover, and then Warhol had them tour with a light show in 1966 and '67, these shows becoming legendary as the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” This was the beginning. The film covers the entire eight years of their career. There are excerpts from interviews, including some from group members who are now deceased, and those accompany a lot of historical footage of the group. And all this is quite standard for a documentary, but Haynes presents the film in a style that simulates the New York avant-garde cinema of the 60s, and especially that of Andy Warhol. Haynes uses lots of split screen, sometimes with footage in one section and interview material on the other, but often with more than two sections in the split, and a constant swirling visual effect, mixing painting, sound, photographs, and talk, which strongly evokes the period of the 1960s and early ‘70s, in which the story took place. We learn a lot about Warhol's methods and the people in his orbit. We learn about Nico walking away to do other things eventually. We learn how the chemistry between Reed and Cale went badleading to Cale's exit and Reed's refashioning of the group. And all this is conveyed by Haynes' uncompromisingly flamboyant style. Any movie about the group with this material would be good, but this wild aesthetic form adds immeasurably, I think, to the film's power. At the time, the Velvet Underground only had a cult following. In the era of peace, love, hippies, and pot, their songs about the underclass and urban angst, and harder drugs like heroin, were not a best-seller. But years later, after Reed had made a successful solo career, these early albums became enormously influential in rock music, and remain so to this day. Now we have the film The Velvet Underground, and it gives us a satisfying taste of what it was really like to be there.

An evil eye changes the appearance of two young people in love so that they can’t recognize one another, in a film from the country of Georgia that reveals the world of myth and folklore underlying everyday life. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? This intriguing and ambiguous question is the title of a new film from Georgia (the country), in which complex levels of meaning are designed to convey a love story in all its simplicity. It's written and directed by Aleksandre Koberidze, and it seems fitting that the title is an open-ended question, since he is clearly open to as many aspects of ordinary life in a Georgian city as he can be. The central narrative is about a young woman, Lisa, and a young man, Giorgi, who meet by chance on a street and fall in love on first sight. They find one another again that evening, and arrange to meet later and talk at a certain place, forgetting to tell each other their names. At this point we discover that Koberidze sees the reality of everyday life overlaid, as it were, with dimensions of myth, folk belief, and folk tale. But if you're expecting what we've come to call magical realism, this film offers something different. In the modern era we've largely shut the realm of folklore out of our lives, to the point where the word myth has come to mean false, but Koberidze is telling us that it's just about different ways of looking at things, and that metaphor is a vehicle for whatever meanings we seek and find in life. We are introduced to this through an old-fashioned method: a narrator who tells the story of what's going on while we're watching. And so, the narrator tells us, unbeknownst to Lisa and Giorgi, an unknown force, an evil eye, has put a curse on both of them. They wake up the next morning with completely different appearances than they had before. In the film, we see new, different actors playing them. Because of this, when they go to their prearranged and unfortunately crowded place to meet again, they can't find or recognize one another. They each know that they've changed, but it doesn't occur to them that the other has changed as well. Now, this sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone. But the way the film presents it, it's just another problem in life to be dealt with somehow. The seemingly supernatural change is really just a metaphorical challenge: how much do we define ourselves and others by appearance? If we're truly in love, shouldn't we able to know each other without being guided by the physical? Well, no, actually. And it's complicated by the fact that they've changed in other ways. Lisa, a pharmacist, has lost her medical knowledge and must find a new job. Giorgi, a footballer, can't play well anymore, but he remains a fan. The permutations of this hide-and-seek scenario continue to gently undulate throughout the movie. In the meantime we discover the real subject of the film, the experience of daily life for folks in the city. Koberidze's camera follows a host of different people as they go about their business, with a special emphasis on children. Appreciate the now moment, the film seems to be saying, because that's all there really is. In addition, the elements of storytelling are shaken and spilled into many forms. We see a host of techniques, like a playful lesson in cinematic style: realism, fantasy, slow cinema, real time, offbeat editing, slow motion, and the use of music to color scenes in radical ways. The narrator talking to us while we see silent action, and dialogue printed in intertitles, almost brings us back to square one of film history. The best symbolism doesn't explain everything, but casts a spell that can lead to many places, so in this strange and lovely movie, as we ask What Do We

Bernard Shaw’s popular comedy, about a phonetics professor who makes a bet that he can turn a street person into a lady, was given near perfect form in a 1938 movie starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. Bernard Shaw wrote over sixty plays in his long career, most of which were intended as provocations to the conventional wisdom of the time. Arguably his most popular play was Pygmalion, written in 1913. I assume that many of you know about it, but I can safely say that the vast majority of people are more familiar with a musical based on it called My Fair Lady. The story concerns Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics who can tell where anyone in England is from, just from their accent. Encountering a rude Cockney flower seller named Eliza Doolittle, he makes a bet with a friend that he can train Eliza to talk like a noble lady, and pass her off as one in society. Promising her a more affluent situation, he takes her into his home, and the resulting conflict between the two constitutes the main body of the story. Now, as entertaining as My Fair Lady is, being a musical means that it romanticized its source and softened the content. The play was a biting satire on social class and snobbery. Its title comes from a Greek myth in which a sculptor named Pygmalion falls in love with one of his statues, and it comes to life. So a central theme here is the foolishness of a man like Higgins, who molds the outside of a woman to be what he wants, but never really understands or appreciates her as a person. Pygmalion was made into a film in 1938, starring Leslie Howard as Higgins and a relative newcomer, Wendy Hiller, as Eliza. It was directed by Anthony Asquith, and Leslie Howard, who was passionate about this role, also acted as the film's co-director. A team of fine screenwriters adapted the play under the supervision of Shaw himself. The result is an absolute delight, one of the universally acknowledged masterpieces of British cinema. Wendy Hiller was chosen by Shaw because she had played the role on the stage. She's a perfect Eliza, a coarse guttersnipe whose contrast with the sophisticated Higgins is a delicious comedy in itself. Now, I know some who don't think much of Leslie Howard because of his weak performance in Gone with the Wind, made a year later. But Pygmalion shows him at his best, superbly conveying his character's self-assurance and charisma. Higgins' mean side is not concealed—the arrogance of the upper class mentality is one of the main points of the play—but at the same time, Shaw's dialogue for him makes him a compelling critic of the society of which he's a part. Howard dominates the film almost like Higgins dominates Eliza, but the brilliance of the play lies in how Eliza confounds expectations with her native cleverness. Howard and Hiller are a sensational couple on screen. We've gotten used to assuming that Professor Higgins will fall for his creation, just like in the Pygmalion myth. But whatever you can say about Bernard Shaw, he was never sentimental. The play goes against our expectations. The film, however, manages to play it both ways in its touching, satisfying, and believable ending. Pygmalion is a movie treasure that I can't do without.

In this long crisis, it sometimes feels as if time has lost its meaning. Making a list, for example, of my favorite films of the year is much more difficult this time. Many pictures that were going to be released in 2020 were delayed, and so now, in addition to the 2021 films, there are the ones finally released from the year before. Too many good movies! Well, that's a nice problem to have. As always, I'm late because I like to wait until many of the year-end releases make it to my neck of the woods. Adding to the challenge is that my viewing has been almost exclusively through streaming platforms and not theaters. For Flicks, I used to make a distinction between films actually shown on screens in my city, and anything else. That distinction is now gone, and I'm glad. The Works and Days (C.W. Winter & Anders Edström). Here is a film in a category by itself. The full title is The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin). In eight hours, it covers a year in the life of an extended farm family and their neighbors in a mountain village of rural Japan. Tayoko is a central figure, who performs numerous chores on her little farm, while her husband who has fallen ill, likes to drink with his friends and watch matches of Go, the board game, on TV. Tayoko occasionally narrates from her diary, but the point of view is omniscient, and we follow a lot of people other than her. The picture is directed by an American and a Swede, which might seem odd for a Japanese film until you learn that Tayoko is Edström's mother-in-law. There's a famous wisecrack that some film students may have heard: “If I wanted realism, I’d look out the window.” Well, this is the film that looks out the window, and it’s beautiful. In every frame, we see the everyday, and it’s all real in a sense that’s more pure than I can describe: the daily tasks, the natural world surrounding; conversations mostly casual but some meaningful. It’s not hermetic: this is modern Japan with cars and refrigerators and so forth, but it's not at all like watching a story—this is to enter a stream of experience. The running time is an essential aspect. The long form allows this experience to unroll and simulate to a degree the awareness of reality. Of course this limits its audience, and that's OK. I watched it, and was enraptured. The Father (Florian Zeller). This is the story of a man, a father, gradually succumbing to dementia—a fairly common story, you might think, but the way the story is told is devastating. Through puzzling twists and turns in the story and dialogue, along with brilliant effects of scenery and perspective, the film depicts dementia from the sufferer's point of view. The ingredient that makes it so powerful is Anthony Hopkins in the title role. He absolutely nails this part, conveying the anger, defiance, confusion, denial, fear, and helplessness of a man losing his way. The Father doesn't condescend to pity, the style seeking to replicate instead the ruthlessness of the disease. The ending is utterly heartbreaking, just the same. Mangrove  (Steve McQueen). This is the first film in McQueen's epic collection Small Axe. It tells the true story of a restaurant called The Mangrove, a center for the West Indian community of London in the late ‘60s. The Mangrove and its owner are made the

A married woman visits three friends in the city, and we are inspired to consider what is the nature of happiness for women in a “man’s world.” An undesirable side-effect of watching lots of Hollywood movies is that we become used to films that try for big, splashy effects—blockbusters and self-important message films, full of noise and drama. We're not used to smaller scale modest efforts; we have trouble noticing subtlety and nuance. The films of Korean director Hong Sang-soo tend to fly under the mainstream radar. But there's hidden treasure here. His latest picture is called The Woman Who Ran. We meet Gam-hee, a married woman played by the warmly expressive Kim Min-hee. Since she got married, she's never spent a day apart from her husband, but now he's on a business trip, and she travels to Seoul to visit some old friends. Her friend Young-soon is divorced, living in an apartment complex with a roommate. They have a garden and some chickens, and Young-soon is mostly content with her life. The dinner conversation ranges widely, from the trials of getting older to philosophical subjects. At one point, the roommate describes how the rooster they have jumps on the backs of hens, pecking at them mercilessly, just to show, according to her, that he's important. This small detail is part of a larger pattern in which women acknowledge men and relationships as problematic. Gam-hee then stays with another friend in town, a Pilates instructor still trying to find her vocation in life. Their conversation is a bit more guarded, but also revealing. The friend is having an affair with a married man, a fact that emphasizes her tenuous self-image. Then, by chance, Gam-hee runs into the wife of an artist that she herself used to be with. Although the possibility of regret is in the air, the two are able to talk about their situations as grown-ups, and when the husband shows up, it's not really a surprise to find that he's kind of a clueless and self-centered guy. Hong is a master of the “ordinary.” He can take the merest wisp of a story and create a gentle naturalistic slice-of-life movie like this. His editing flow and relaxed narrative rhythm are as comfortable as a well-worn pair of sandals, and I think this opens up the possibility for viewers of insight into the characters in particular, and questions about happiness in general. What does it mean for each woman? And how is it affected by living in what we are used to calling a “man's world”? The title, The Woman Who Ran, refers apparently to someone mentioned in one of the conversations, a minor character, whom we never see, and whose actions pose a question that is never answered. Then again, I think it points obliquely to Gam-hee herself, who escapes temporarily from the security of married life to learn about herself by checking in with friends from her past. 28 feature films in 25 years. That's the astonishingly prolific career of Hong Sang-soo. He writes and directs movie like Stephen King writes books, although in all other respects their work is very different. Hong can do this because he doesn't try to please anyone but himself with his low-key, intelligent, personal dramas about people interacting with one another in ordinary settings. The relationships of men and women are always one of the subjects, painted in shades of uncertainty. The Woman Who Ran is one of his more inspired artistic efforts, direct and simple, yet thought-provoking. For Hong, and for those who enjoy his movies, less is definitely more.

The Harlem Cultural Festival was a music festival taking place in the same summer of 1969 as Woodstock, and its amazing line-up, and insight into how it happened, is finally presented, 52 years later. Movies about music festivals have a built-in appeal: if you like the kind of music featured, the festival film gives you a variety of different artists in that genre. The gold standard is still Monterey Pop, about the 1967 festival of that name. And of course, there's Woodstock, chronicling the famous gathering in 1969 that was seen as a kind of summing up of the rock and pop music then. Now, just last year, a film was released about a major music festival that took place the same summer when Woodstock was happening. It was the Harlem Cultural Festival, a free event that occurred at Mount Morris Park on six successive weekends from June to August of '69. This did not get very much attention. I, for one, had never heard of it. The film is called Summer of Soul, and my jaw dropped when I saw the list of performers. But first you need to know that Summer of Soul is also a record of a crucial time in the history of the Black community in America, and the production was put together by Ahmir Thompson, more popularly known as Questlove, a major author and producer, and one of the frontmen for the band The Roots, which is The Tonight Show band. Each weekend in the Harlem Cultural Festival highlighted a different type of Black American music. In the course of the film, we watch performances by B.B. King, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Chambers Brothers, and David Ruffin, the lead singer for The Temptations who had just left that group to go solo. We see The Fifth Dimension performing there as well, and two of the members of that group talk about how excited they were to play in Harlem, because their sound was sometimes dismissed as “too white,” but the film showcases their stunning vocal mastery. The jazz portions include Herbie Mann, Abbey Lincoln, and Nina Simone. And a very interesting long middle section shows the strong influence of gospel on the Black music scene, with performances by The Staple Singers, The Edwin Hawkins singers with “Oh Happy Day,” and the Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson. Interspersed with all the great music are clips and interviews profiling the social and political situation in Black America at that time. Dr. King had been murdered only the previous year, and there was a new militancy in the air. Civil rights and social justice were part of the festival, and we are shown a very young Jesse Jackson speaking to the audience about the need to continue the struggle for peace and justice. Interviews with artists and people involved in putting the festival on emphasize the strong sense of togetherness experienced at these events. In such an atmosphere of joy and hope, it is somewhat difficult for us now, over five decades later, not to feel some frustration at how much racism has continued as a political force in our country. But the people being interviewed caution us against despair. The love and solidarity, expressed through music and activism, is still alive today, as we see, for instance, in the Black Lives Matter movement. So why did it take so long for this film to be released? One of the sponsors of the festival, Maxwell House Coffee, filmed all the performances. But after being minimally aired on a couple of TV specials, the footage ended up sitting in a basement for fifty years until it was discovered by an archivist in 2004 who alerted others to take on the task of restoration. Now, thanks to them and to Questlove, this brilliant event has come to life again in Summer of Soul. You owe it to yourself t

Wes Anderson’s playful new film is presented as an issue of a Paris-based American magazine, with three stories about the eternal appeal of non-conformists. Wes Anderson has a style that is decidedly his own and no one else's. Those of us who follow his work are familiar with his toy-like production design, bright colors, block-like movements and set ups, eccentric stories and characters, and obsession with detail. His latest is called The French Dispatch, which is the name of a fictional weekly magazine, a foreign affairs supplement to an American newspaper in Kansas, of all places. The Dispatch itself, however, is published in a small French town, and edited by a grouchy, avuncular oddball played by Bill Murray. This is all just a framing story. The movie itself is presented as if it were an issue of this magazine, with an introduction, three feature articles, and an end note. The lightness of the premise, in a story anthology form instead of the usual long single narrative, allows more freedom for Anderson's silliness. We know that he loves silliness, but here he really doubles down on his comic view of human beings and their struggles. I think it takes courage to be this silly, this willing to throw caution and plot believability to the winds in the service of laughter. The three main sections are in black-and-white. I think it was a kind of dare to do this, to demonstrate that Anderson (and his longtime cinematographer Leonard Yeoman) can achieve striking beauty without color. The black-and-white puts a new emphasis on Anderson's sense of pattern and space. This version of the world as a series of mazes and tunnels, to be observed through windows and precarious angles, becomes more striking without the distraction of color. On the other hand, the surrounding sections that are in color evoke a crucial difference between the printed word and the people creating it. The first story is about an outsider artist, played by Benicio del Toro, creating his paintings in prison, who is discovered by an art dealer and impresario played by Adrien Brody, desperately and hilariously trying to promote the work, and himself. In the second story, Frances McDormand is a Dispatch writer who finds herself more intimately involved in the drama of a Paris youth movement headed by a young rebel (Timothée Chalamet) than she should be. The third features Jeffrey Wright, imitating the mannerisms of James Baldwin, as a food critic doing a piece on a chef, who instead ends up in the middle of a kidnapping story involving the son of a police commissioner played by Mathieu Almaric. All three stories reveal unexpected depths of meaning and rueful wisdom about life's hard knocks. The Dispatch is clearly meant to be a goofy tribute to The New Yorker, the American magazine with a long and storied literary influence. Anderson loves to make fun of the craft of writing, and the pretensions that always come to the fore, but it is an affectionate ridicule, which conveys a longing for the days when journalism was braver and more lively. I think he also loves the idea of having his own acting troupe—the picture is so full of famous actors that it can be distracting at times—oh look, there's Henry Winkler, or Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, and many others in small parts. But it's all part of the game. The French Dispatch may not be Wes Anderson's best film, but it's possibly his most playful.

A film from Norway about a young woman seeking fulfillment in relationships takes the conventions of romantic comedy and turns them over to reveal the male-centered trap underneath. The Worst Person in the World. Now, there's a title that will get your attention. But this new film from Norwegian director Joachim Trier is named ironically. It's not a portrait of an evil person at all, but of someone who is set up by the world she lives in to blame herself for everything. Julie, a medical student played by the excellent Renate Reinsve, suddenly realizes that she doesn't want to be a doctor after all, but would rather study the mind, in other words, become a psychologist. Then she changes her mind again and says she will pursue photography. As an audience, we might be tempted to see her as flaky, but the film makes us see that this kind of wavering is normal for someone in their 20s, especially someone in the upper middle class. The one element that does disturb Julie's focus is romance. Once again, normal. She loves the initial very blissful stage of connection with an attractive man, and of course this element includes sex, a pleasure that we all know is powerful. The subtle point we're made to realize is that the unspoken but real male social dominance makes it harder for women to navigate career and romance, and the one aspect the film beautifully portrays is how relationships inevitably become about the man's thoughts, desires, and overall narratives; automatically relegating women to a supporting role. This all might sound rather dry when I describe it, but Trier and his screenwriter, Eskil Vogt, weave a remarkably observant portrait of people trying to navigate the rules of the game, and Reinsve's performance is a constant revelation of female intelligence, desire, and frustration. Julie gets into a relationship with a well-known artist who is fifteen years her senior. The enjoyment of each other's company is genuine, but she ends up feeling like a spectator of her own life. She eventually cheats on him with a married man she meets at a wedding reception that she's crashed, but rather than take this plot development for granted, the film beautifully conveys the gradual stages, from initial flirting while feeling a sense of taboo, to final acceptance of the need to be together, the peak being a long brilliant sequence in which everyone in the world stops in a freeze-frame while Julie runs through all these stationary figures to see her new lover. But we know—and this is another clever thing—that the same contradictions will arise again. When I thought about the film's clear-eyed view of patriarchy, I considered opening this review by saying, “What if Woody Allen were a feminist?” But that's actually selling this movie short. Yes, it's written and directed by men, and it doesn't have a radical style, but I rarely see films in which the intricacies of love, sex, and relationships in a male-dominated world, are so finely and compassionately exposed. The men in the film are not depicted as bad people, even though we know such men exist. Instead, everyone in this story is well-meaning, trying their best, but it's the unconscious assumptions and unspoken rules that are driving everything. The ads and previews try to tell us that this is a romantic comedy. Well, OK, but if so, it's the least consoling rom-com I've ever seen. It's frequently funny, but there are no jokes or gags. The humor springs from anxiety and loss. The Worst Person in the World, with its mocking title and lovely main character, may seem light-hearted on the surface, but it carries the weight of disappointed dreams.

Mike Leigh’s 1988 breakthrough film already contains what makes him great: working class issues, funny believable characters, and a fine sensitivity for the miseries of family life. For decades I've been enjoying and writing about the films of English director Mike Leigh: Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, these are just a few examples. But it was only recently that I watched his breakthrough film, the movie that essentially brought him to the attention of the world, from 1988: High Hopes. It seems to me that High Hopes provides something of a key to Leigh's work. Cyril and Shirley are a leftist working class couple living in London, and getting by on low wage jobs. Cyril, played by Phil Davis, is a Marxist intellectual who's become embittered about the possibility of change in the era of Margaret Thatcher. Shirley, played by Ruth Sheen, shares his radical orientation, but she is more practical, more positive, and very funny. They are good caring people who sometimes quarrel like most couples. Cyril's elderly mother, played by Edna Doré, lives in her own flat and seems permanently depressed, her cognitive abilities and energy clearly at a low ebb. Cyril and Shirley try to be helpful to his mom, but she tends to resist help. Cyril's sister Valerie, played with manic intensity by Heather Tobias, puts on a big show of loving their mom and doing nice things for her, but her constant annoying giggle fails to conceal her unacknowledged rage. She's married to a cynical and abusive used car salesman, a real creep named Martin, played by Philip Jackson. These are the five main characters, but there are others with scenes that are funny and significant. The mother's next-door neighbors become involved when she locks herself out of her flat. These neighbors are hilariously clueless upper class twits played by Lesley Manville and David Bamber. They temporarily take over the film. One of the things this movie made me realize is that even though Leigh's characters tend to be “oddballs” and eccentrics, and the minor ones are often outrageous (but funny) caricatures, they all look more like people I know or see in everyday life than the sanitized, superficially flattering versions of ourselves that we see in most films and TV. In Hollywood terms, Ruth Sheen, for instance, looks awkward and ungainly, but she is the one performer in the film that you will remember most of all, because she plays such a genuine good person. After awhile you lose that initial awkward impression and accept her and her pleasant looks like you would real people you might know. As in many of Leigh's films, High Hopes is centered on working class issues. The frantic yuppie Valerie and her craven husband represent the emptiness of consumer society, and the upper class twits are utterly self-centered. But the movie doesn't idealize the central couple. Cyril feels too powerless and disgusted to stay involved in activism. And he rejects Shirley's desire to have a baby because the world is too corrupt to raise a child in. This conflict between them, which keeps recurring, happens within a real loving relationship, so it doesn't break them. But it's poignant. The plight of the elderly mother evokes some deep sadness. Why her life has disappointed her we never learn completely, although there are clues. But Leigh takes the time to present the chaos in her insane family from the old lady's point of view, and it is tremendously moving. The writing is witty and thoughtful, and it should be noted that, as in all Leigh's films, the actors helped write their own dialogue. It's rare also to see an essentially comic film have an impact as a good domestic drama as well. High Hopes

A brother and sister, their addict mother in jail, try to get by under the poverty line in a depressed southern Ohio town, and end up hanging out with some dangerous people. Out of nowhere comes this film, entitled Holler, from writer-director Nicole Riegel, and it is really something; a beautiful portrait of down-and-out working class life. It’s hard to believe this is Riegel’s debut feature; it is so strong and self-assured. We first meet Ruth, played by Jessica Barden, as she helps her brother Blaze collect cans from dumpsters which they then sell to the local junkyard. But it's not enough. When she gets home, there's an eviction notice on their door, which Ruth pulls off and hides underneath a pot with all the previous ones. She's a senior in high school whose struggle to survive makes her late for class when she actually does show up. Her older brother, played by Gus Halper, is protective. Despite their desperate situation, he's determined that Ruth will go to college, and he is proud when she gets an acceptance letter. But his sister blows it off. She says they can't afford tuition, but the truth is she doesn't want to abandon Blaze, one of those guys trying to carry the world on his shoulders. Their mom got addicted to pain pills after she injured herself at the factory, and is basically detoxing in jail. Desperate, they accept an offer from the junkyard owner to work on his crew breaking into warehouses and factories and stealing scrap metal. Copper fetches a high price, and other metals are worth good money too, so now Blaze and Ruth can make and even save some cash, but always at the risk of getting busted. Riegel writes about what she knows—she comes from the Ohio rustbelt, and the story of Ruth trying to find a way out is largely autobiographical. The film expertly evokes the real working class world of low-paying factory and retail jobs. The time is late December, early January. It's cold, the sky is overcast, and the light often has a bluish tinge in Holler's frequent afternoon and evening scenes. Riegel doesn't indulge in what has come to be called “miserablism,” however, trying to make everything seem as terrible as possible. There's enough suffering to go around, but as in real life there are moments of closeness, humor, even joy. We meet some of their friends at the frozen foods plant, whose support for one another is a relief from the indifference of the plant owner and the local cops. Jessica Barden, who you'd never guess is a British actress, is a winning presence as Ruth. She can be really funny with wisecracking insults, but there's still a vulnerability there that attracts other characters, even the sleazy junkyard owner, a long-haired beer drinking tough guy dealing drugs on the side. But as you might expect, the whole business with stealing scrap metal is not as safe and secure as promised. Most of all, the underlying insecurity of life on the edge in white working class America is a constant. The corporate economic system benefitting rich people who live far away from this little town frames everything and everyone in a confining dead-end narrative. Holler doesn't offer us glib answers or easy resolutions. Ruth's life seems real and immediate; the environment Riegel has created around her is vivid, detailed, and honest. This part of Ohio is actually the northern tip of the Appalachians, and “holler” is a distortion of the word “hollow,” describing a valley, and really a kind of life. Holler, the film, as it happens, also represents a shout, a cry for freedom.

Almodóvar’s latest explores the ambiguities of motherhood, while also spotlighting the issue of memory in the Spanish Civil War. Spanish writer and director Pedro Almodóvar's previous film from 2019, Pain and Glory, was a triumph that to many seemed like a summing up of his entire career. Rather than trying to top that somehow, his new movie, Parallel Mothers, covers ground that by now is pretty familiar to those of us who follow his work, but at the same time, through a bit of artful misdirection, ventures into new territory. Penélope Cruz plays Janis Martinez, a successful Madrid photographer in her late 30s. As the film opens, she's doing a photo shoot for a magazine article about a forensic anthropologist named Arturo. After the shoot, she asks him for a favor. Her great-grandfather was shot by the fascists in 1936, during the Spanish civil war, and buried in an unmarked grave along with several other people from her home town. Her family and the people of the town want the grave exhumed so that the bodies can get proper burials, but the government is dragging its feet. Could Arturo use his influence to expedite the matter? He promises to try. They get together for drinks, and one thing naturally leading to another, they go to bed, although he's a married man. Cut to nine months later. Janis is pregnant; in the birth center she rooms with a pregnant teenage girl named Ana, played by Milena Smit, whom she helps get through her fears about giving birth. Ana's mother is an ambitious and self-absorbed actress about to get her first break in the theater, leaving Madrid just when her daughter needs her most, and so Janis becomes something of a big sister to Ana. Both births are successful, and they both have daughters. But then, when Arturo visits to see the baby, he makes a comment that enrages Janis but also plants a seed of doubt in her mind about his paternity, and she begins to suspect that the babies got mixed up somehow at the hospital. Almodóvar has always loved to take themes and motifs from romances, pulp fiction, or soap operas, and use them to deal with themes that are dear to him. The idea of babies that are accidentally switched at birth is really one of the soapiest of plot devices you can think of, although it also has roots in the comic tradition going back all the way to ancient Roman drama. In this case, the plot is a way for Almodóvar to explore motherhood, a constant obsession in his films, and in this case also the relationships between mothers, and how they can be painful or fruitful depending on the decisions they make. Janis's decision is to bring Ana closer to her by hiring her as her live-in-maid and babysitter. Now, the interest here, despite how it may look, is not in the outlandish situation, but in the character of two women, the brave but emotionally conflicted Janis, and the immature, mixed-up, but intrepid teenage mother Ana. The young Milena Smit is a compelling presence in the film, and a good match of opposites with Penélope Cruz. Cruz, on the other hand, so perfectly embodies her role that she seems almost like a medium for Almodóvar's intimate notions and issues. Thus the title, Parallel Mothers. The women are different, but their lives are parallel and work best together. Or as a t-shirt says that Janis wears, “We should all be feminists.” But wait. Just like the babies getting switched, so Almodóvar performs a switcheroo on us. As we near the end of the film, the sub-plot about exhuming the civil war grave in Janis's town takes center stage. This is a theme right out of the news: Spain is now going through yet more pain and controversy around the war in the ‘30s that ended with a fascist victory. Relatives of the many peo

In 1937, Warner Brothers released a film attacking the rise of hate groups in America that were terrorizing immigrants and minorities. Humphrey Bogart stars in this extraordinary movie. After the Second World War, a lot of what had been happening in the U.S. before the war was swept under the rug and forgotten. Nazism and fascism were seen as things that happened in Germany and Italy, an evil that caused the rest of the world to unite in order to defeat it. But the fact is, these political movements had supporters in just about every country in Europe, and the United States. Antisemitism was pretty mainstream, and the rhetoric from such prominent men as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford was in line with what Hitler was saying. The color line was absolutely in force as well—black Americans were segregated off from white society in every important respect. But for the most part, the movies ignored all that, presenting a world of adventure, comedy, dancing, music, and escapism to audiences during the Depression. Political topics were discouraged, both by the powerful forces in American society and the studios themselves, that didn't want to disturb people, because that could potentially drive them away from movies, thus not spending the money in theaters that kept Hollywood going. Among the studios, however, Warner Brothers was something of an exception. Their stories were aimed more at working people in the cities, and they produced a lot of social problem pictures such as Dead End and I Was a Prisoner on a Chain Gang. One of the most unusual of such films, released in 1937 and directed by Archie Mayo, was called Black Legion. Humphrey Bogart plays a factory worker named Frank Taylor, happily married with kids, who is expecting and looking forward to a promotion, when he can provide better support for his family. But to his shock and surprise, he gets passed over for this promotion by someone with a Polish sounding name, an immigrant who has worked hard and stayed up nights learning the business. While he simmers with resentment, a co-worker tells him about a secret vigilante group called The Black Legion, that commits violent acts against foreigners and immigrants who they say are stealing American jobs. If you join them, he is told, you must pledge total secrecy and loyalty to the Legion. Frank agrees to join, and when the Legion meets we see that they wear hoods and practice cult-like loyalty ceremonies. They get rid of Frank's rival and thanks to them, he gets the promotion. But the Legion's demands on his loyalty end up putting a strain on his relationship with his wife and best friend. If you're expecting a simplistic happy outcome here, the film presents a bracing and uncomfortable reality instead. Bogart hadn't yet become the big star he would be in the ‘40s. He was mostly doing supporting roles, often as villains. Although he's kind of a villain here too, he plays the main character, and the drama consists in his inner struggle between his decent impulses and the hatred against other groups that gradually takes over his mind and heart. It's a very effective performance. The story, by Robert Lord, was inspired by an actual anti-immigrant group in Michigan. But there are pointed similarities to the Ku Klux Klan as well. The Klan had become a powerful and widely accepted group in America, and it actually sued Warner Brothers because the movie used a Klan symbol in one of the scenes, but a judge threw out their case. There's no mention of Jews or Blacks in the film—there were things you just couldn't say in those days and be accepted in the mainstream of the entertainment industry. But the implications are clear, and watching this now is kind of scary because of the relevanc

A film about an agent of a Swiss bank working to support the military dictatorship in 1980s Argentina reveals how little it takes for people to look away from evil when being silent is to their advantage. Already we feel a sense of constriction, an oppressive claustrophobia and holding in of emotions, before we even know exactly what we're looking at in Swiss director Andreas Fontana's debut film, Azor. A man and woman arrive in Argentina, and gradually we learn that the man, Yvan De Wiel, played by Fabrizio Rangone, is a Swiss banker, and the woman is his wife Inès, played by Stéphanie Cléau. Yvan is there to replace one of his business partners at the bank named Réné, who had gained prominence among the bank's super-wealthy clients in Buenos Aires, but who recently departed under mysterious circumstances. Réné was apparently both popular and trusted by these secretive clients, so Yvan is worried that they will miss their former banker too much to put their trust in him. And no one can say why or how Réné left, but there are hints of a possible transgression, something that might have alarmed the government. Yvan is a very quiet, contained, diplomatic type. Privately he has doubts about his ability to handle this new assignment, but Inès is always there to strengthen his backbone, and to remind him of how careful he needs to be, while her presence on the trip is ostensibly to put their fabulously wealthy customers, and their wives, at ease, as if this were merely a social visit. The director, Fontana, doesn't give the audience much information on what's going on. We have to stay on our toes and pay close attention, just like Yvan and Inès, and after some time we discover that the story is taking place in the early 1980s, when Argentina was ruled by a military junta that had recently taken power in a coup. The government is waging what eventually came to be known as the “dirty war,” a violent purging of leftists, liberals, intellectuals, and anyone else opposing the policies of the dictatorship. Near the beginning of the film, the car taking the Swiss couple from the airport is delayed at a checkpoint, and they see two young men up against a wall, being searched by police. We almost expect to see them shot, but this film is all about drawing conclusions from what we don't see or hear. The car goes on and we never find out what happened to the men, if anything. Yvan's clients are from the ruling class of Argentina. They live in luxurious villas and hold meetings in expensive hotels with swimming pools and waiters serving cocktails. Clearly, the Swiss bank that employs Yvan is financing the junta and all its activities, but everything is shrouded in vague phrases and euphemisms. Yvan's studied politeness is a marvel of stone-faced restraint. The title of the film, Azor, we discover, is a kind of code the couple adopted from the banking world of Geneva, meaning “to be careful and quiet.” There’s an unnerving air of menace throughout the movie, which you might expect to explode into some kind of thrilling climax, but instead just keeps simmering, and this is a major element in the thinking of Fontana and his co-screenwriter, Mariano Llinás, about the reality of societies under dictatorship, as opposed to the more dramatic effects of fiction. Crucially, the film shows how ordinary people doing business can agree to participate in evil—by being silent and pretending they don’t see. Yvan starts to piece together a possible reason for Réné's disappearance when he visits the man's deserted flat and sees a list of clients with one unfamiliar name at the end: Lazaro. Who or what is Lazaro? He will need to find out, but without disturbing the delicate power relati