Links:

• In Vulture, Matthew Jacobs interviews Sissy Spacek about 3 Women (1977):

  Jacobs: With that beer in the bar, Robert Altman asked you, kind of spontaneously, to down the entire thing, and apparently it didn’t go too well on the first take. Do you remember that story?

  Spacek: I remember when I went through the saloon doors I fell and broke my tailbone.

  Jacobs: Oh my gosh.

  Spacek: Then I walked around with one of those little circle pillows.

  Jacobs: Okay, I didn’t know that. I was thinking of the story Altman has told about you throwing up after downing that beer for the first time.

  Spacek: You know what? I must have blocked that out.

  Jacobs: He talks about it in the audio commentary on the film. Then he said, “Do you think you can do it again?” And you said yes. The things we do when we’re young, right?

  Spacek: Isn’t that the truth? But if he’d said, “Jump off the building,” I probably would have.

• In the Journal, an excerpt from Elenor Coppola’s memoir (Two of Me: Notes on Living and Leaving, November):

  Our nephew Nicolas Cage came to live with us for a year when he was 14 and his parents were divorcing. I was anxious for him to feel as little displaced as possible. We created a room for him in our attic. I let him select a new bedspread and I can still remember the hippie patchwork red velvet one he chose. I felt guilty that he was on our third floor while Gio and Roman were on the second, but I didn’t want to put Nicolas in with one of them and have any resentment. Nicolas was a good sport, although he told me he saw a ghost standing at the end of his bed: “She looked like you, but as an old woman.” I could see his wild imagination at work and his interest in being an entertainer as he pranced around the house doing Elvis impersonations.

• In The American Scholar, Dennis Drabelle on Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks:

  In the interview with Bogdanovich, Hawks explained his penchant for relationships in which the woman is the aggressor: “I do that on purpose every once in a while because it amuses people. . . . It allows you to make a scene that’s a little different. Hitchcock tried it in North by Northwest (1959).”

  Film historian David Thomson goes so far as to call North by Northwest a screwball comedy. He exaggerates, but the movie does have its wickedly funny moments, such as when the audience is made privy to a hush-hush meeting of the (fictional) United States Intelligence Agency to discuss a festering problem: Thornhill, an advertising executive, is being confused with an invented government operative named George Kaplan and is the object of a nationwide manhunt. “How could he be mistaken for George Kaplan,” one of the spooks scoffs, “when George Kaplan doesn’t even exist?”

Reviews:

• reviews Mr. Soft Touch (1949):

  All of the success of Joe, the character, can be put down to Glenn Ford. This movie unites so many disparate tones that without the right cast it’s going to fall apart. Glenn Ford is the right man for this job. He is so damn likeable. He has a smile he can never suppress for very long, even when things get dark. He has an instinct for the right gesture, the right tone, the gallant move, though he does these things so correctly you can’t always tell if he’s sincere. There’s a kind of movie star whose charisma comes from the way they don’t seem like a movie star; they are not the Everyman, which is too exalted-sounding, they’re more like the Everyguy. James Garner is an Everyguy and Glenn Ford is an Everyguy. They exude a natural ease and flirtatiousness that extends even to the camera.

  Evelyn Keyes, playing Glenn Ford’s romantic interest and foil, had starred opposite Ford several times before Mr. Soft Touch and that gives the two of them a natural chemistry, albeit a chemistry they each find alarming at different times and for different reasons. In a non-literal sense, Keyes’s Jenny forms the bridge between the very real violence of the criminal underworld and the funny antics of the settlement house, because she walks in both worlds. When Joe cruelly accuses her of slumming it, she pushes back her hair to reveal that she has to wear a hearing aid; her father beat her as a child so badly she went deaf. She knows the police (and Joe) view her as an easily manipulated bleeding heart, but she doesn’t live in denial of human evil or violence. She just thinks she’s stronger than they are. She can stand out like a good deed in a naughty world, as Shakespeare puts it.

  [I watched this at BDM’s urging and can report that it is now on the list of movies I say I’m going to rewatch around Christmas—and then I watch maybe half of them. Also on the list, besides the subject of this month’s Movies across the decades, are (in chronological order) Remember the Night (1940), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), A Christmas Carol (1951) (the Alastair Sim one), My Night at Maud’s (1969), Fanny and Alexander (1982), A Christmas Story (1983), A Christmas Carol (1984) (the George C. Scott one), Metropolitan (1990), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and The Holdovers (2023). —Steve]

• Two in our sister publication on the Hudson:

  • Anna Shechtman and D. A. Miller review Radu Jude’s two most recent (Kontinental ’25, 2025; and Dracula, 2025):

    This anticlimax is where Kontinental ’25 most bluntly defaults on its debt to its ostensible model, Europa ’51 (1952). Rossellini’s film pictures Irene as a bourgeois housewife, whose choice to surrender her comforts rather than tolerate the inequities on which they depend is legible to others only as a form of madness or saintliness. Her own humanity is sacrificed either way. The film concludes with a close-up that turns Irene’s mute agony into the sign of an insoluble social system—one that ignores or ennobles human suffering sooner than redress it. But Orsolya, finally, isn’t asked to carry such conflict for Jude’s cinema; she accepts the specious reconciliation of moving on. Her face will never fill the screen as Irene’s does, scaling up from the individual to the collective, signifying calamity for a whole continent or world order.

    The buildings of Cluj shoulder that load instead. All along, Jude has punctuated the story with cryptic architectural interludes—assorted shots of city facades. Some are fit for a tourist brochure; others, luxury apartments, look like residences at the Kontinental Boutique before the fact; still others are the cheap, ugly boxes that now full Cluj as they do any megacity in China. The film ends with a long, affectless montage of such buildings, many under construction. But they no longer look cryptic, only banal. “Real estate developers,” Orsolya says during her crisis of conscience, “run Romania”—and the closing images seem to confirm it. There is, certainly, a lot of development. The shelters will remain full.

  • Alex Ransom reviews Kelly Reichardt’s latest (The Mastermind, 2025):

    What follows is a quick, unsuccessful stop in Cleveland and then a concluding sequence in Cincinnati, where Mooney’s flight is finally halted—but not in the way you’d anticipate. Reichardt has always had a talent for eluding her audience’s expectations, denying any sort of heightened drama in favor of a humbler realism, and often truncating her narratives at their most confounding points. River of Grass (1994) ends with its protagonist stuck in traffic after committing an abrupt and wordless murder; Meek’s Cutoff (2010) with its cast of pioneers possibly as lost as they were at the beginning, or possibly saved; and First Cow (2019) with its two main characters lying down for a rest and presumably about to be murdered, though we don’t see the act. Here Reichardt closes the film on a shot of policemen after they’ve violently broken up a peace rally, Mooney having been mistaken for a protester and driven off in a paddy wagon. One of the cops picks up a marcher’s fallen hat with his billy club, dons the hat himself, and does a mocking little dance with it. Rather than a tidy conclusion, we’re given a poignant and unsettling joke.

Reviews of books:

• In The New Statesman, George Monaghan reviews Cameron Crowe’s memoir (The Uncool, October):

  Cathy never grew beyond adolescence. Crowe remembers her as an “awkward but sincere” teenager with a “romantic sense.” She introduced him to his favorite emotion, the one all his art seeks: what he calls “happy/sad.” It came when she first asked her parents: “Am I not normal?” It also came when he confided his first crush to her and she made him ask out the girl, who rejected him. He felt “like a hero, even for losing,” “part ache, part exhilaration.”

  As a journalist, too, Crowe was reluctant to flatten feelings. His colleagues believed that their job was to tear down the mirage of stardom and expose the ordinary people behind it. Crowe understands that “mystique” amounts to little more than not being seen—in Almost Famous (2000), David Bowie is hurried through a lobby with his face concealed—but part of him still wants to let it stand. Of all his articles, he is proudest of an interview with Joni Mitchell where he broke the cardinal rules of rock journalism: he “sinned” by letting Mitchell edit the piece and thereby control her image. At one point in the interview, Crowe asks if Mitchell had a moment when she knew she was no longer a child.

N.B.:

• The pope’s favorite movies.

• A history of the workplace as depicted in movies.

• An interview with Noah Baumbach.

• An interview with Laura Dern.

Critical notes:

• Pope Leo XIV:

  Cultural facilities, such as cinemas and theaters, are the beating hearts of our communities because they contribute to making them more human. If a city is alive, it is thanks in part to its cultural spaces. We must inhabit these spaces and build relationships within them, day after day. Nonetheless, cinemas are experiencing a troubling decline, with many being removed from cities and neighborhoods. More than a few people are saying that the art of cinema and the cinematic experience are in danger. I urge institutions not to give up but to cooperate in affirming the social and cultural value of this activity.

  The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is, above all, an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us and sometimes even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express.

Movies across the decades:

The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (dir. Eldar Ryazanov, 1976)

Read more

Links:

• In The New York Times Magazine, on watching comedies in theaters:

  Take The Naked Gun (2025). The original spoofed cop shows and films noir, delivering outrageous sight gags in a hard-boiled deadpan. This year’s version channels a different set of touchstones—it’s lit like a Tony Scott movie—but the love of sight gags remains. There’s a fight scene tallied by a “Take a number” sign. “Cold cases” are wheeled out of a literal walk-in freezer. Some of these jokes sit in the center of the frame, but many are tucked slyly into the background—exactly the sorts of jokes you might miss if distracted by your phone.

  Each time I saw the film, I watched the same moment transpire: Certain viewers would be first to catch a background joke, and their laughter would make everyone else search the screen for whatever they had missed. We were, delightfully, being asked to pay attention to the film, and to one another. One room cracked up at a vulgar joke about a woman’s behind, while another went for an outrageous and surreal midfilm montage—but each bit was made genuinely funnier by the dozens of people gasping and wheezing over it.

  [I experienced something similar when I went to see The Naked Gun, although having it put as bluntly as “this is a film that asks you to pay attention to it” is pretty shocking. —Steve]

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri on Luchino Visconti:

  Like all biopics [Ludwig (1973)] compresses a life into a coherent line, yet it becomes a portrait of a mind that cannot reconcile history with meaning. Ludwig is both sovereign and prisoner; free of ordinary constraints yet trapped in a system he neither controls nor understands. His fate lies not in insanity alone, but in the impossibility of living as though civilization were still whole. The pacing is novelistic, built from images, pauses, and reported actions, with the sense that history now proceeds without its actors. Ludwig stands as a symbol of cultural ambition magnified to the point of fragility. The other main characters, Queen Elisabeth of Austria (Romy Schneider) and Wagner (Trevor Howard) fix the drama’s axis.

  Again, by degrees, the main character’s story becomes a metaphor for the psychological condition of European civilization in decline. In The Damned (1969) Visconti had shown how the distance between cultural aspiration and political reality could produce a wholesale perversion of spiritual values. Ludwig returns to an earlier moment in that descent, when the ideals of Romanticism still held sway yet were beginning to collapse under their own contradictions. The king’s retreat into aesthetic fantasy embodies a paradox: that of art elevated to religion as belief in a civilization that has begun to falter. Nowhere is this clearer than in his devotion to Wagner, whose music he worships while ignoring the man’s opportunism and vulgarity. It is not only that the king cannot see Wagner clearly, but he cannot bear to.

  [Death in Venice (1971), which also comes up in this piece, is the story of a man who cannot see himself clearly because he cannot bear to. —Steve]

• In , on the Ranown westerns directed by Bud Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott:

  [Scott’s] physical affect drives commentators to reach for deific adjectives. His stony face, André Bazin wrote, “irresistibly recalling William Hart’s right down to the sublime lack of expression,” with a detachment, Paul Schrader mused, akin to that of a “Pantocrator looking down from a Constantine dome” who “increasingly . . . refers to himself in the third person.”

  Schrader may be onto something when he compares Scott to an austere deity. Scott’s hero in Seven Men from Now (1956) drops offhanded comments, judgments by implication. He uses them to subtly undermine the weak and corrupt men around him. Schrader dubs it a “crackerbarrel Socratic method: questioning, teasing, suggesting.”

  Other characters chatter themselves into corners, imagining the silent Scott is along for the ride, only to be brought up short with a simple contradiction. A cavalry officer scornfully describes a Chiricahua uprising and too late realizes Scott isn’t echoing his sentiments. Scott comments that the natives are hungry, which makes them dangerous. “Then we agree,” the soldier prompts.

  “Do we?” Scott responds.

• Two in The New Yorker;

  • Justin Chang profiles Richard Linklater:

    Linklater described Blue Moon (2025) as “this sad little howl into the night, of an artist being left behind,” whereas Nouvelle Vague (2025) throws off a youthful spirit of creative vigor. Hart had a brilliant but too-short run; Godard outlived nearly all his contemporaries and became one of the world’s most important filmmakers. What unites the two men in Linklater’s vision is a suspicion of traditionalism and a hatred of complacency. Hart dismisses Oklahoma! as pandering sentimental claptrap, impressively engineered but lacking in humanity. With Breathless (1960), Godard turns filmmaking into film criticism, all but weaponizing the motion-picture medium against itself. Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon both circle the same question: Is it better for an artist to satisfy or challenge an audience—and must the two be mutually exclusive? Also: What happens when a great artist is also an impossible human being?

    Both films took more than a decade to get off the ground, a situation that isn’t unusual for Linklater. He is, by his own admission, “a slow thinker,” and always has various projects on various back burners, a metaphor that he drew on often enough in our conversation that I began to wonder about the exact size of his stove. “I appreciate years of making the film in your head, a lot, so then, by the time you’re really making it, your instincts are honed,” he said. “I wouldn’t like being thrown into something I haven’t thought out.” Paradoxically, the payoff of this slow-thinking approach has been an extraordinary level of productivity.

  • Anthony Lane on Il Cinema Ritrovato:

    My first port of call was a workbench commanded by Marianna de Sanctis, who wore white gloves, like a conjuror or a croupier. In front of her were two rotating spools, the size of paella dishes, fixed flat upon the bench; by turning a wheel at her side, she wound a reel of negative film from one spool to the other, pausing to examine its condition. The scrutiny was made easier, here and there, by placing the strip of film on black velvet, against which the negative showed up as positive. And, oh, the thousand natural shocks that film is heir to! Scratches, tears, and “perforation loss”—sprockets missing on one or both sides of the frame. Some injuries could be treated with tape, including a special perforated kind. “Of course, we have to put the tape on without any bubbles or dust,” de Sanctis said. “Repair is important, but also we have to try to avoid too much intervention,” she told me. “The less we do, the better.”

    The film that she was attending to as we spoke was Bitter Rice (1949), which was due to be screened at the festival, in June. Starring a teen-age Silvana Mangano as one of a host of women who are dispatched to the rice harvest in the valley of the River Po, the movie is a near-mythological item in the resurgence of Italian cinema after the war. At the laboratory, multiple reels of the film, each in an old metal can, were piled in stacks. Labels stuck to each can indicated, in English, the state of the contents. The one for the reel on which de Sanctis was working, for instance, told a sad story of degradation. An “X” was inked in the last of three little boxes: “Slight/Physical Decay,” “Average Decay,” and “Strong Decay.” Another box marked where on the reel the trouble lay: “Head,” “Centre,” or “Tail.” If only mortal decline could be registered with equal efficiency, we would all be saved an awful lot of fuss.

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Thames, Michael Wood reviews Highest 2 Lowest (2025):

  Now the film begins to reveal its method, which is to allow each story to be hijacked by another before it’s settled in. An invitation to this method can be found in Lee’s predecessors; the film is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), which is a loose adaptation of Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom (1959). But Lee turns it into a genuine scamper, where the scampering becomes the point. This is one of the recurring pleasures of his films. He likes to mix genres and return to places and people. I’m thinking now particularly of Da 5 Bloods (2018), but similar effects occur in much, perhaps most, of his work. Kurosawa’s film also opens with shots across a river and a conversation in a penthouse. But the business being discussed is shoes rather than music, and while remaining faithful to much of the plot, Lee has made a quite different movie, marked by elegant allusions rather than debt.

• In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri reviews Megadoc (2025), a documentary about the making of Megalopolis (2024):

  In that early footage, we also see Virginia Madsen playing Wow Platinum, the gold-digging newscaster memorably played in the finished movie by Plaza. Again, two completely different performers, two presumably quite different interpretations of a singular role. The uniqueness of Coppola’s approach clearly attracted Plaza to this picture; she seems to thrive on the uncertainty. “This is a nightmare,” she says she told Coppola when she first read the script, but she means it in a good way. One of Coppola’s preferred ways of trying out his actors is to have them say a particular line over and over again with a totally different intonation each time, and we can see Plaza’s eyes lighting up at the opportunity; she embraces the mischief and the lunacy. Watching her throughout Megadoc, it seems as if she has found a kind of happy place. Honestly, she might be the best thing in both films.

  Figgis, himself an Oscar nominee and once a major figure in international cinema, is a curious choice to make a movie like this. As he notes himself, he’d never seen another director at work before. At 77, he might not be the household name Coppola is, but over his career he has been no less formally ambitious: This is the man who made 2000’s Timecode, a fiction feature consisting of four intersecting long takes that played simultaneously in a four-way split screen. (He repeated some of those ideas in 2001’s more successful Hotel.) Figgis’ experimental streak isn’t evident in Megadoc; he seems more content to sit back and observe. Maybe that’s because he realizes he doesn’t have to intervene, that what’s happening before his camera is interesting enough.

  [There is an interview of Agnes Moorehead on The Dick Cavett Show where she describes how Orson Welles prepared her for a scene in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) where her character breaks down: he had her rehearse it eleven times with wildly different characterizations—girlish, insane, drunk, and so on—so that the final performance would have pieces of all of them in it. —Steve]

N.B.:

• An interview with Jim Jarmusch.

• People are mentioning A24 in their dating app profiles.

• Robert Redford died on Tuesday, September 16. R.I.P.

  • The quest to figure out where his blazer in Three Days of the Condor (1975) came from.

• Claudia Cardinale died on Tuesday, September 23. R.I.P. [After Alain Delon’s death I discussed The Leopard (1963) in WRB—Sept. 2024 Film Supplement, with an eye towards how beautiful he is in it. But any discussion of beauty in that film, as mine did, will eventually come around to how beautiful Cardinale is in it as well. —Steve]

Movies across the decades:

Punch-Drunk Love (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)

Read more

Links:

• In The Sewanee Review, Matthew Zipf on Renata Adler’s film criticism:

  “House Critic” is a sharp essay, but not, Adler insists, a hatchet job. The terms in which writers have described her essay—the “demolition,” the “vivisection,” the “hatchet job,” the “autopsy report,” the “infamous evisceration,” the “legendary evisceration,” the “iconic evisceration,” the “8,000-word evisceration,” the “unforgettable and long-needed evisceration”—reproduce, even when the authors agree with Adler, some of the exact habits of mind that she was arguing against. Adler criticized Kael’s obsession with the body, her delight in blood and guts, her love, in fact, of the word “visceral.” These habits of mind, Adler wrote, have “proved contagious” in American writing, such that she struggled with them herself: “it becomes hard—even in reviewing Ms. Kael’s work—to write in any other Way.”

  But one can speak more plainly of Adler’s piece. If something is bad, and you show how it is bad, at great length and in great detail, then you have not done hatchet work. Adler was not out to chop just anything down. She was fair, in her way. These were, after all, Kael’s words.

  Long before the Kael piece, Adler had written one of her plainest, most definitive, and, I see now, possibly cruelest sentences: “I believe in quotes.”

  [“I believe in quotes” is a pithy version of “for by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” And “visceral” really does deserve a place on the list of words writers use when they can’t be bothered to think of other better words, up there with WRB classics “luminous” and “vital.” I’d like to know which particular viscera are affected. Personally, I find that film has the greatest effect on my spleen, while my gallbladder is quite sensitive to poetry. —Steve]

• In The New Statesman, Tanjil Rashid interviews Whit Stillman:

  Stillman thinks similarly. “I love literary criticism,” he enthuses. “Samuel Johnson is my favorite writer.” Only one film other than his own—René Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris (1930)—has been mentioned in our conversation. Otherwise, perhaps in keeping with his screenplays’ verbosity, he cites writers and literary critics, not auteurs and film theorists. Book reviews by Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy and Alfred Kazin find their way into the chatter of his films. “You really like Trilling?” Audrey asks. “I think he’s very strange.”

  Why is literary criticism so central to the vision of Stillman’s films? It recalls a time when the practice was not merely about art, but life itself, illuminating “the moral imagination,” Trilling writes, “inviting us to put our own motives under examination.” Stillman’s films do that. Their creator is a moralist, but not in the puritanical sense employed by Ellis; rather in the capacious sense of the so-called English moralists, the mainline of English literary criticism going back to Johnson. At Harvard, Stillman tells me, he’d studied under Johnson’s biographer, Walter Jackson Bate. “A lot of his theories and insights are with me to this day,” says Stillman. Importantly, Bate wrote that “the aim of art,” for Johnson, was “the moral enlargement of man.” This is the true meaning of Stillman the moralist: not one who judges narrow-mindedly, but mind-openingly.

  [The world of film criticism has a little bias towards writer-directors with the emphasis on writer—Billy Wilder, Éric Rohmer, Richard Linklater, Stillman, to name a few (to be clear, I like all these directors, at a minimum, and Rohmer might be my favorite director period)—simply because they are more like film critics, with all their words, than the average director, who for obvious reasons tends to have a more visual intelligence.

  I recently rewatched Ball of Fire (1941), which was directed by Howard Hawks from a script co-written by Billy Wilder, and then read something about it calling attention to the “Match Boogie” reprise of “Drum Boogie” and claiming (correctly, I think) that if Wilder had directed his own script it would not have been there. It doesn’t advance the plot, and it doesn’t reveal anything about any characters. It’s just there because it looks cool. Most directors are in the business of putting cool-looking things in their movies for their own sake; Billy Wilder thought of movies differently and so was not. —Steve]

• In Defector, on Kiyoshi Kurosawa:

  For Kurosawa, true escape—from social responsibility, self-knowledge, and moral consequence—is ultimately impossible. Though superficially a melodrama, the tone of Tokyo Sonata (2009) is much closer to a psychological thriller. He has compassion for his characters, but not empathy. Straitjacketed within their social and familial roles, the Sasakis can only express themselves through easily disproved lies and facial muscles that ripple during a nightmare. In the films of David Cronenberg, psychological evolution expresses itself through physical transformation, in all those grotesque appendages that externalize what has already changed below the surface. For Kurosawa’s characters, the mental and social strictures are simply too strong; no matter how deeply they have been transformed on the inside, they go on living their lives as if nothing has changed, incapable of articulating this shift in conscious or corporeal terms. Their professional identity, their familial role, even their private personality erect a containing wall around their deeply unstable self. But these protections become their own prison; whether the dam holds or collapses, no one survives. When it turns out that the pair’s adolescent son is a piano prodigy, the effect isn’t uplift but horror at the thought of a precocious genius suffocated by a family too insensate to recognize it.

• Alan Jacobs on Allan Dwan:

  He told Bogdanovich that when directors started taking seventeen weeks to make a picture that he would have made in seventeen days, that brought in the producers to manage everything. After that, no director was safe from studio interference. This reminds me of something Christopher Nolan said in his Desert Island Discs interview a few years ago: that right from the beginning of his career he made a particular point of bringing his movies in ahead of schedule and under budget because that was the only way to keep the studio execs away from his sets.

  Dwan’s stories are wonderful because they show what it was like for Hollywood to be invented. Nobody knew what they were doing. He tells about his days as a writer and scenario manager: he showed up at a shoot in Arizona only to discover that the director had disappeared and the actors were just sitting around. He called his bosses in Chicago to report what had happened, and they told him, “Well, you’re the director now.” He had no idea what a director did—but, with the help of the actors, he directed the movie. This happened in 1911. Dwan kept directing movies until 1961.

  [1911 was probably the perfect time for this to happen—just before they started making feature-length films in America, so Dwan’s job was to make something short. And they weren’t just inventing Hollywood; they were also inventing directing and editing. —Steve]

  • Clint Eastwood (who makes basically all of his films on time and under budget):

    The objective is to make everything sound like the first time it’s said, so the only thing I can do is try to pick it up the very first time it is said. So a lot of times I’ll do it that way. I know some people don’t like to do that. And if it doesn’t come out perfect the first time, you have to go onward and upward with it. But you’d be surprised with good performers how interesting something can be the first time they try it.

    [I appreciate the obvious annoyance at sometimes having to shoot more than one take. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In Sidecar (the NLR blog), Leo Robson reviews Eddington (2025):

  Eddington has things in common with Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing (1989)—that phrase is used—in which a conflict of perspectives in a tight-knight community boils over into violence, Falling Down (1993), Joel Schumacher’s thriller about a middle-aged man stressed-out to the point of murderous vigilantism, and The Simpsons Movie (2007), which traces the fallout after the people of Springfield are forced to live under a glass dome. But the closest precedent for the way things unfold is the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, both of whom are thanked in the end credits. Joe Ross is a confounding meld of Coen Brothers types. His sense of being out of step or out of his depth, recalls Ed in No Country for Old Men (2007), a sheriff in—neighboring—west Texas, and the Minnesotan physics teacher in A Serious Man (2009), who feels that reality is conspiring against him, except that Joe’s response is to fight back. At first he resembles Marge, the local policewoman in Fargo (1996)—a debt perhaps reflected in Aster’s town-name title—and even the Dude in The Big Lebowski (1998), sleepy and grunting, but he quickly mutates into Walter Sobchak, the Dude’s pal, who pulls out a pistol and asks, “Has the whole world gone crazy?” though the grievance in that case is the disregard of rules—crossing the foul line in a game of ten-pin bowling—not their arbitrary imposition.

  But while Eddington shares those films’ reluctance to reconcile competing visions of reality, or display a preference, its exit route is closer to despair than shrugging nihilism, less diminuendo than deus ex machina and reductio ad absurdum—not life going on in its pointless, baffling way but going to hell in a handcart. And whereas the Coen Brothers retreat from polemic, using their occasional freighted backdrops—the Gulf War in The Big Lebowski, Washington, D.C. in Burn after Reading (2008)—as a source of abstract concepts or allusive gags, Aster is genuinely engaged with America in the age of Twitter and Trump.

• Two in UnHerd:

  • Geoff Dyer reviews About Dry Grasses (2024):

    In other words, this was the opposite of being bored which means it was the opposite of watching action scenes which bore the living shit out of me. In The Whole Equation (2004), David Thomson writes that in the history of cinema no effect is “as momentous as shots of a face as its mind is being changed.” I’d push this a bit further and draw attention to the face that can’t make up its mind, that perhaps doesn’t know for sure what its owner is thinking, or that is taking pains to make sure that this process is concealed from the other participants in the scene but is somehow revealed to the audience so that the face on screen effectively holds up a mirror to our attempts to work out what we’re seeing, if we are capable of attending closely enough. That, it goes without saying, is worth attending to very closely. About Dry Grasses insists not only that we attend very closely, but that we do so over an uncomfortably extended period of time. As a result time, if you have a comfortable seat, flies by, almost.

  • Frederick Kaufman reviews Sunset Boulevard (1950):

    Wilder was particularly attuned to the moral dangers of narcissism, as his family had fled a European continent drenched in images of Adolf Hitler. He knew the hazards of personality cults, which echoed his native Jewish distrust of false idols. Yet in Hollywood, Wilder had made a living out of idol worship. His spiritual dilemma hearkened back to John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century allegorical novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which characters named Christian and Faithful are drawn to a marketplace called Vanity Fair, which in many ways resembles Fifties Hollywood. Here, money and materialism override “lives, blood, bodies, souls”, so that the worth of an individual can only be measured through his or her commodification. While Faithful manages to escape, his companion Christian is burned at the stake.

    A similar fate awaits Gillis, as when the writer finally packs his bags and tries to save his soul by getting the hell out, Norma shoots him three times in the back. As the press crowds her living room, Desmond tips over the edge. Unable to comprehend that she is about to become a lurid headline, she can only interpret the attention as an increase of her power. “This is my life,” Norma says. “Just us. And the cameras.”

    [I was going to ask if we need to explain what The Pilgrim’s Progress is, but then I remembered that during a red-carpet interview a few years ago Hugh Grant described the Oscars as “Vanity Fair” and the interviewer thought he was talking about the afterparty put on by the magazine of that name. —Steve]

Reviews of books:

• In the local Post, reviews a book about Humphrey Bogart and John Huston (Bogart and Huston: Their Lives, Their Adventures, and the Classic Movies They Made Together, by Nat Segaloff, August):

  Worst of all, Bogart and Huston leaves the central question untouched. What of their friendship? What light does it shed on their films? In truth, a perfunctory remark in Segaloff’s introduction just about sums it up: Bogart and Huston were “close friends who didn’t spend much time together between films.” Attempts at formulating a more daring thesis—much less one that has anything substantive to do with the films in question—remain unconvincing.

  And even if the book did treat us to enlightening or salacious disclosures about its principal characters’ friendship, what would they reveal? Could they make sense of the taut precision of The Maltese Falcon (1941) or the clenched tension of Key Largo (1948)? Could they tell us why The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is a great movie and Across the Pacific (1942) is only a decent one? Criticism is the only way to penetrate the question of quality, but it is almost wholly absent from Bogart and Huston.

N.B.:

• An interview with Emma Thompson.

• An oral history of The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005). [I will continue to insist that it is one of the few movies from this century participating in the tradition of the great romantic comedies. —Steve]

• The Sound of Music (1965) was not popular in Austria when it came out—“the whole film must have felt to audiences there like a reminder that they had been on the wrong side of history.” [The Sound of Music is one of the five or so movies I hate the most—perhaps widespread exposure to it is responsible for the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in America?—and so it brings me no pleasure to report that other people dislike it for the wrong reasons. I simply stand with Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen when it comes to movie musicals:

  When asked to direct, Stanley Donen refused to have anything to do with it. When Lehman sounded out Gene Kelly about directing, he led his questioner to the door of his home and said, “Go find someone else to direct this piece of shit!”

  —Steve]

• China is making a lot of movies about the Second World War.

• Terence Stamp died on Sunday, August 17. R.I.P.

Movies across the decades:

Kiss Me, Kate (dir. George Sidney, 1953), 10 Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999)

Read more

Five years in the army and some considerable experience of the world had by now dispelled any of those romantic notions regarding love with which the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books commenced life, and he began to have it in mind, as so many Managing Editors have done before him, to marry a woman of fortune and condition.

Links:

• In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri on the wave of math in movies:

  Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme (2025) takes a more playful approach. In that film, the audience is actually asked to do some ongoing calculations as we track international construction tycoon Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) on a mission to convince various partners to put up more money for an immense project. A recent trade war has raised the price of a key building ingredient. An onscreen tally keeps count of Zsa-Zsa’s progress, informing us of the gap in his budget, how much money he needs to fill it, and how much has been pledged; it’s up to us to figure out whether he’s getting close. “I’ve asked a lot of my audience in many ways,” Anderson told me when I spoke with him about this earlier this year, “but this is the first time it goes to math. But in a fun way, I think.” In fact, the math winds up not mattering—because Zsa-Zsa’s project runs headlong into his irredeemably evil and irrational brother, Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), in a scene in which the characteristic precision and careful composition of Anderson’s visual style give way to unhinged, handheld, snarling chaos. By the end, our protagonist has given up his dreams of material wealth. He’s broke, running a small bistro with his daughter. And he’s happy, maybe for the first time in his life. Believe it or not, Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson) might be proud: At the end of Materialists (2025), she’s backed off from her math-obsessed ways, ditched her unicorn gazillionaire boyfriend, and made off with her struggling-actor ex, John Finch (Chris Evans). She also seems happy.

  [The Managing Editor majored in math and is happy to tell you what math is really about: it’s a bunch of nerds sitting in a basement at 2 a.m., drinking copious amounts of coffee and/or energy drinks, mostly fidgeting with pencils except for the occasional moment of furious writing. (The professors are not particularly different, although most of mine kept more regular hours.) Make that into a movie. —Steve]

• In the Financial Times, Stephen Bush on the appeal of Superman:

  There has long been a tension between Superman’s sunny optimism, all-American values and vast powers. Marvel’s Captain America embodies similar values, but he, when you get down to it, is really just good at punching stuff. He can be at odds with the authorities, and it works dramatically, because he doesn’t have the power to reshape the world.

  In Richard Donner’s 1978 movie Superman, which stands alone with its Donner-directed sequel as the only Superman film to achieve commercial success, critical acclaim and long-term renown, Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane, upon hearing that Superman stands for “truth, justice and the American way,” quips that he’s “gonna end up fighting every elected official in this country.” The problem is that Superman could—if he chose to.

  [I have enjoyed the existence of the new Superman movie because it has allowed me to explain that a good Superman movie would be half a gender-swapped The Lady Eve (1941) and half The Nutty Professor (1963), full of blundering and self-sabotaging attempts from our hero to win Lois’ affection. Unfortunately this movie will never be made, first because nobody makes romantic comedies anymore, and second because people continue to believe that Superman is about a guy with powers saving the world and not a love triangle.

  What would happen if Superman fought every elected official in the country is rather beside the point. This is not a useful way of thinking about political questions. Superman does not exist, and to the extent he does it is as an idealized embodiment of the United States of America. James Gunn was apparently ignorant of this, and, despite thinking he was making a movie about the importance of being nice, he made a movie (as a few reviews have noted) defending the foreign policy of George W. Bush. This was inevitable from his premises. In his movie America—sorry, Superman—has an obligation, on account of his incredible power and goodness, to intervene in foreign conflicts regardless of what any governments or international organizations say, and upon intervening the Americans—sorry, Superman and his friends—are greeted as liberators. That Gunn could so badly misread his own movie comes from a failure to understand that the specifics of the hypothetical scenario he invented determine how it should be understood. It is not a neutral starting place from which he can go anywhere he likes. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, James Quandt on Jacques Rozier:

  Inspired by Breathless (1960), Rozier made a feature so intently New Wave–ish in its technique—the incorporation of documentary, the use of direct sound and handheld camera, street shooting with curious passersby gawking into the camera, jump cuts, soft image wipes, staccato editing, and abrupt fade-outs—and in its tone, a Rimbaudian exaltation of youth, that it appears to be both archetype and parody of the movement. Originally conceived as what Rozier called a “frivolous” musical comedy whose title, Kiss Us Tonight, evoked the popular cinema of the 1930s that he admired and wished to emulate, Adieu Philippine (1962) caused him what he later described as “black panic, major stress, a little like piloting a Boeing.”

  Adieu frustrated and then infuriated the formerly generous Beauregard, who insisted that Rozier adhere to their contract, which required that the film be no longer than two hours—the director wanted half an hour more—and summoned the veteran auteur Jean-Pierre Melville, whom Rozier suspected of being jealous of young filmmakers, to suggest cuts. After its release was delayed by problems with the soundtrack, Beauregard more or less abandoned Adieu, telling everyone it was “worthless,” and was astonished when critics and directors such as Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut joined Godard in judging it a masterpiece.

• In our sister publication out West, Michele Willens interviews Kenneth Turan about his book on Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg:

  Willens: If you could have lunch with one of these two men, which one would it be?

  Turan: I’d maybe choose Mayer because you never knew what he’d say. Thalberg, by contrast, was so self-contained. But he had this gift no one could explain, even in his late teens. Because he had always been sickly, he spent a lot of time reading novels. So, he knew about storytelling. He ran Universal before he was old enough to sign the checks. Even those who didn’t like him realized he knew how to do this. It was an instinct. And he had a gift for understanding what audiences wanted. He was a big believer in audience testing. Previously, only comedians during the silent era had used that. He’d move around the audience when the film was on, so he could sense what they were reacting to and what they didn’t like. If he wanted to redo a scene, he’d pull the writer off another project, and the actors off another set.

Reviews:

• Three of Barry Lyndon (1975):

  • In The New Statesman, David Sexton:

    Instead of Barry Lyndon’s own narrative, there’s a superbly saturnine commentary (delivered by Michael Hordern), in which he tells us everything: not just what has happened and what is now happening, but also what is going to happen. The soundtrack is no less masterful, using wonderful pieces such as the Sarabande from Handel’s Keyboard Suite in D Minor and the second movement from Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 to determine the tempo and feeling of scenes in an unforgettable way. Ryan O’Neal may have seemed an odd choice for the lead but the combination of his good looks and curious lack of purpose are perfect in context. Likewise, the fantastically beautiful but scarcely acting Marisa Berenson as Lady Lyndon was great casting.

  • In UnHerd, Aris Roussinos:

    None of this Irish context, keenly felt by Thackeray, survives Kubrick’s adaptation. Yet even when pushed to the background, Ireland’s history has a way of reinserting itself to the foreground: Kubrick’s year-long location shoot in Ireland was brought to an abrupt end by an anonymous threat, purportedly by the IRA. The director would never film outside southeast England again. And of all this freighted material, Kubrick makes something darker still. Where Thackeray’s novel is a picaresque entertainment, Kubrick’s film is a cynical exploration of human society, viewed with a detached anthropological eye. Where Thackeray has chance determine the fortunes of his characters, Kubrick introduces the remorselessness of fate. Like its long reverse zooms, which reframe the central characters as insignificant additions to overpoweringly grand landscapes or palatial grounds, Barry Lyndon shows the individual attempting to break the confines of a society whose precepts he ultimately does not question. His Hogarthian rise and fall seem preordained in a way they do not in the novel: the film’s opening and closing duels, which seal his fate, are both Kubrick inventions. Where Barry is himself the unreliable narrator of Thackeray’s novel, Kubrick adopts the omniscient tone of a mid-nineteenth century novelist, freely adapting the original prose for the voiceover narration into his own pastiche of Thackeray’s style. Most of this wry and worldly commentary on man’s foibles, overlaying the film like a God tiring of his own creation, is purely Kubrick’s own.

  • In the Financial Times, Robert Smith:

    Yet the person who has done the most to popularize Barry Lyndon with Gen Z audiences is arguably Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, the British-born and Atlanta-raised rapper better known as 21 Savage. In 2021, a 30-second fan edit set to the tune of his aptly braggadocious, yet faintly melancholic, tune “A Lot” took the internet by storm.

    The video’s creator, Flanthippe, who has dutifully re-uploaded it numerous times in response to copyright claims, explains to the FT that the choice of song came first. He then realized that Barry’s rise and fall fit perfectly with the chorus (“How much money you got? A lot. How many problems you got? A lot.”) “I was very lucky that there were so many scenes that could be applicable to the lyrics,” Flanthippe says, adding that he is “appreciative of how it introduced a lot of people to the film.”

    Barry Lyndon’s ability to beguile younger audiences is born of a paradox: Kubrick’s film was ahead of its time, yet antithetical to much of the modern filmmaking they are exposed to.

  [More about Barry Lyndon, with a focus on the music, in Movies across the decades below.]

• In our sister publication out West, Ryan Bedsaul reviews The Phoenician Scheme:

  Anderson’s filmmaking suggests otherwise. The Phoenician Scheme’s style seems designed to dramatize Zsa-zsa’s moral conflict by substituting the meta-cinematic narration in his more recent films with a metaphysical framework provided by surreal dream sequences. After every near-death experience, the film launches him into a black-and-white heavenly plane where his conscience is put on trial. In one of these fantasies, Zsa-zsa carries an arrow-strewn elk to a panel of judges in the celestial courtroom, drops the animal on a marble slab before them, and cuts down the length of its neck. As the wound opens, gold coins flow out of the elk and spill onto his feet like a sacrificial offering. It’s a haunting image—not the kind one would expect of a Wes Anderson movie. Same with the color-negative effects that light up the screen as the judges glare at Zsa-zsa. These dreams are matched in tone by other images in the film: plane wreckage, brute industrial projects, arid desert landscapes, sepulchral mansion hallways, a pit of quicksand. Like every insured treasure in Zsa-zsa’s possession, they remind viewers of the armed conflicts, forced labor, and famines that paved the way for the character’s success. Together they are like the specter of Death that follows Antonious Block throughout The Seventh Seal (1957). As Zsa-zsa says on more than one occasion, “I think I recognize that assassin. He used to work for me maybe.”

Reviews of books:

• In The New Yorker, Richard Brody reviews a biography of Clint Eastwood (Clint: The Man and the Movies, by Shawn Levy, July):

  The power of this guarded solitude translates, in movie-business terms, into a word that’s a pillar of Levy’s portraiture: independence. The young Eastwood was a tall and muscular outdoorsman who’d watched lots of movies as an adolescent and had travelled up and down the coast for manual-labor jobs. It was during his time in the Army—he was drafted during the Korean War but remained Stateside—that he made actor friends, including David Janssen, who encouraged him to test the waters. “You should be an actor, you could make it, because people notice you,” one friend said. “Even when we go in a restaurant, people turn and look at you.” On the basis of his physique and his looks, he was signed in 1954 by Universal and given bit parts while attending acting classes there. The lessons didn’t initially take: the Method held sway there at the time, and he had difficulty with its self-revealing and emotionally forthright style. The breakthrough came when an acting teacher, Jack Kosslyn, delivered a precept that Eastwood often quoted: “Don’t just do something; stand there!”

  [Play Misty for Me (1971), the first movie Eastwood directed, is not, alas, very good, but it is revealing about Eastwood in ways much of his work is not. That he plays a character who treats women very similarly to the real-life Eastwood and almost pays for it with his life seems like Eastwood working through his own life in his work. This would be rare as his career went on. —Steve]

N.B.:

• The world of scammers pretending to be Hollywood stars, and what the stars are doing about it.

• “The tiny Greek island with the world’s most romantic cinema”

• New York City’s only brick-and-mortar video and DVD store.

Movies across the decades:

Barry Lyndon (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

Read more

“I do love you and you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible.”
“What’s that?”
“Read the Washington Review of Books.”

Links:

• In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri on Wes Anderson:

  Asteroid City (2023) built on the dense and perplexing anthology of The French Dispatch (2021), which presented a series of stories about journalists. In each of these episodes, characters long to break free of their realities without ever quite knowing how: an imprisoned mentally ill artist in love; French students rebelling against a system that predetermines their fate; and a gay African American writer (modeled partly after James Baldwin) living in self-exile in France who pours all his emotions into impeccably crafted articles about food. That film’s repeated mantra—“Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose,” offered up by a domineering magazine editor to all his writers young and old—could easily be Anderson’s own. In his work, a veil of purposefulness hides the despair. Artifice masks the presence of the unknown.

  Oddly enough, as Anderson has become wiser and more reflective, his pictures have become downright meme-worthy in their fastidiousness and precision. The director’s camera moves are exacting, and his compositions carefully arranged, like a cross between a mid-century Belgian comic book and a prizewinning American high-school science-fair project. Some have wondered if he’ll ever relent and go back to working in a more naturalistic vein. Instead, he’s doubled down. “That’s not always my choice,” he says, laughing again. “Somehow, whatever I do, it ends up seeming like I did it. When it’s processed through me, it kind of comes out this way. If you were sitting there next to me, and you said, ‘I can tell you some ways to make this seem like you didn’t do it. Move the camera over here,’ I would probably say, ‘I know . . . but I think I like it more here.’”

Reviews:

• Three of Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (2025)

  • In The Ringer, Adam Nayman:

    It’s a show of respect that Rhames, rather than Cruise, also gets the movie’s last word, a voice-over about world peace and the need for people to look past their differences and realize that [extreme Larry Gopnik voice] we are all one, or something. Cruise is, surely, a Serious Man, but he’s also a savvy operator, speaking through others like a skilled ventriloquist or an Old Testament God. If our Maverick’s oft-repeated belief in the unifying power of cinema—a religious experience experienced with, at minimum, two extra-large bags of popcorn—is what sustains him and what makes him the closest thing we have to an A-list Dorian Gray, then more power to him. (Actually, maybe no more power to him. He has exactly enough power.) But these big-picture platitudes—and the wholly disingenuous self-effacement of the last shot, with our star humbly receding into the shadows—are easier to take when the movies are up to a certain standard. For all the vertiginous excitement of its final aerial set piece, The Final Reckoning comes in under that bar.

  • In Christianity Today, Hannah Long:

    In Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the concluding installment to the franchise, superspy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) borrows Lawrence’s catchphrase as a response to his enemies: “Nothing is written.” One suspects he has in mind not just fictional supervillains but also risk-averse studio executives.

    This phrase, shot through with the hubris of the Lawrence character, is paired with a film that’s chock-a-block full of Christian imagery. None of it hangs together in a coherent way. (Neither does the film.) But as an expression of Hollywood megalomaniacal vision, it’s still strangely pious, a grab bag of Saint Christopher medals, paeans to free will, Cold War–liberal aspirations for global harmony, and an overall lament that no one seems to know the truth anymore because it’s been redefined by “the Lord of Lies.”

  • In Prospect, Alexander Larman:

    Much the same could be said of Cruise, whose 2022 mega-hit Top Gun: Maverick saved theatrical exhibition from its post-Covid malaise, gave him his biggest ever commercial success and made him synonymous with two characters who, in truth, it would be hard to tell apart: Hunt and Top Gun’s Maverick. When it is said, with great awe, of Maverick that “He’s the fastest man alive”, the moment isn’t risible, as it would be with any other actor: it is thrilling, because we sincerely believe that to be the case.

    There are many reasons why Hunt-Cruise remains the last movie star. His dedication to doing his own stunts, however dangerous they might be—and his broken ankle while filming the sixth and best Mission: Impossible picture, Fallout, is testament to the possibility of things going awry—is tied up with an old-school entertainer’s belief in giving his audience value for money. You pay your £10 and, in turn, you see the star risk life and limb on your behalf. Are you not entertained?

• reviews The Iron Curtain (1947):

  The crudest aspects of The Iron Curtain are its newsreel-style voiceover narration and the welling score, especially the bit that sounds like a July 4 marching band playing as Igor steals the secret documents that buy him his freedom. But something about its pure ideological libels made me nostalgic for my own late Cold War youth, when it was clear that the Commies were the enemy, even during perestroika and glasnost when network sitcoms would send their casts on very special episodes to Moscow and Leningrad to discover that the Russians were just like us, simply a bunch of jocks and nerds who only wanted to rock and roll. (I’m thinking of Head of the Class.) Of course, Cold War thrillers, which basically adopted the genre from earlier more sophisticated films like Nazi Agent (1942) with Conrad Veidt as the innocent German philatelist compelled to pose as his evil SS twin brother, didn’t remain this purely crude for long. Even the Bond franchise had to substitute the criminal machinations of SPECTRE for straightforward ideological antagonism. Le Carre knew that most spy stories were really stories about adultery and office backstabbing. Now in a drama like Slow Horses what we get are plots about entrapment, false flag operations gone wrong, and blowback from nihilistic mercenaries still on the loose from the old days and looking for revenge.

• In The Baffler, John Semley reviews Pavements (2025):

  Selling out was, of course, the mortal sin of the 1990s heyday of Pavement’s semi-popularity. Malkmus in particular seemed so resistant to achieving popularity on anything but his own terms that he committed to subtle acts of self-sabotage. Pavements repeatedly returns to the opening lyrics of “Here” as a kind of chorus: “I was dressed for success, but success it never comes.” But that’s not quite right. As depicted in the film, Malkmus seems more like the kind of guy who, if he heard opportunity knocking, would dive and hide behind the sofa. Throughout Pavements we’re shown archival footage of Malkmus sneering at music journalists desperate (or merely professionally motivated) to understand him. The film never really gives a sense of just how exasperated Malkmus’s bandmates were with his slacker obstinacy. As a subject, he remains aloof, if affable.

Reviews of books:

• In our sister publication on the Thames, David Thomson reviews a book about Terrence Malick (The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick, by John Bleasdale, 2024):

  It was understandable by 2011 that Malick, or any of us, might be experiencing an existential crisis in which our feelings about family life could mesh with a fear that creation itself was in such jeopardy that any attempt at self-expression—whether in art, politics or religion—was irrelevant and even fatuous. You could imagine this dilemma inspiring a perverse comedy (think of Billy Wilder or Paul Thomas Anderson running it, let alone Preston Sturges) in which a respected movie director sits in a room full of Hollywood execs. He pitches a film about a vexed family from the 1950s and his own growing anxiety that nothing quite matters. The suits suggest that he warm it up with a little sex and computer-generated violence: they see Will Smith in an abandoned Manhattan, pursued by mad dogs. They perk up and crack open more San Pellegrino. Nevertheless, the room gradually sinks into depression over what their purpose can be, beyond making money from sentimental fantasies and superhero movies. A sort of pornography beckons—not just sex and violence, but dumb riffs on happiness or feeling good, and the dogma in which shots and storylines fit together like Ikea furniture. So what are movies for?

• In the Journal, Farran Smith Nehme reviews a book about the women of the New Wave (Nouvelles Femmes: Modern Women of the French New Wave and Their Enduring Contribution to Cinema, by Ericka Knudson, June 3):

  Thus the unselfconscious, world-changing sex appeal of Brigitte Bardot is analyzed in the chapter called “The Natural Woman.” Anouk Aimée, who left an indelible image in a lace bodysuit and top hat for Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961), has a section called “The Romantic Prostitute,” which enables Ms. Knudson to explore why the sex worker was as fascinating to these upstart directors as she had been to their cinematic forebears. Another chapter, called “The American in Paris,” tracks Jean Seberg’s “fresh and modern” style in Godard’s Breathless (1960). Closing sections give due tribute to Agnès Varda, virtually the New Wave’s sole woman director, and summarize some post-New Wave paths taken by women who had been part of “this exceptional moment in film history.”

N.B.:

• The people who won’t stop talking about the AMC A-List.

• Why Netflix’s action movies are like that.

• An interview with Clint Eastwood: “My philosophy is: do something new or stay at home.”

• Joe Don Baker died on Wednesday, May 7. R.I.P.

• Michael Roemer died on Tuesday, May 20. R.I.P.

• Marcel Ophuls died on Saturday, May 24. R.I.P.

Movies across the decades:

Eyes Wide Shut (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

Read more

Links:

• In Harper’s, an excerpt from Jessa Crispin’s book about Michael Douglas and masculinity (What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything, June 3):

  In an interview for Alec Baldwin’s podcast, Michael Douglas expressed surprise that so many men have approached him on the street over the years to tell him that his iconic Wall Street (1987) character, Gordon Gekko, inspired them to go into finance: “Hey, I was the villain.” And, yes, how could anyone possibly make the mistake of wanting to be like Gordon Gekko, what with his sex workers on call and his stockpile of wealth and his stash of good drugs and his connections at the best restaurants and the best tailors and works by the hottest visual artists of the time hanging on all his walls? Everyone is either in awe of him or terrified of him, and everyone wants to know what he thinks. He’s the villain, but he’s also a tremendous success. It was a problem of the Eighties and Nineties, with Martin Scorsese’s gangsters and David Mamet’s closers and David Fincher’s nihilists and Oliver Stone’s bankers. Artists and writers and filmmakers may have thought they were depicting the thick filth that was running through the world of men, but a lot of men were taking it in and thinking, Yeah, that looks pretty cool. A lot of men watched Fight Club (1999) and started their own fight clubs. A lot of men watched Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and took Alec Baldwin’s sociopathic monologue as an inspirational speech. A lot of men watched Wall Street and decided to go work on Wall Street. (A lot of men also watched Goodfellas (1990) and then decided to endlessly quote Goodfellas.)

  [If not for quoting Goodfellas how would we know not to put too many onions in the sauce? —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Richard Brody on Pauline Kael’s first piece for that publication, “Movies on Television”:

  Kael was forty-seven when her piece was published, and she sharply distinguished between what it was like to watch movies when they were new and what it was like to watch them belatedly, which is to say, out of their social settings. Even the “garbage” movies of her youth mattered greatly, she argued, in that they were “what formed our tastes and shaped our experiences.” But, she went on, “now these movies are there for new generations, to whom they cannot possibly have the same impact or meaning, because they are all jumbled together, out of historical sequence.”

  This is obviously, if superficially, true: discovering a work from the past is different from experiencing it firsthand at the time it was released. But Kael exploits this distinction to assert the primacy of her own critical authority regarding “old” movies solely on the basis of her age and experience. I recently revisited Kael’s extraordinary 1971 manifesto-like article “Notes on Heart and Mind,” and discovered that she had made a similar argument there, affirming her own negative judgment of current movies by contrasting her first-run viewing of older ones with what she deemed the dulled “Pop” sensibility of the young generation. In doing so, Kael was defending her position at The New Yorker (where, by then, she’d been on staff for three years) against ageist calls by studio executives for younger critics who would, presumably, share the tastes of youthful audiences.

  [“You had to be there” as criticism. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The New Republic, Adam Nayman reviews The Shrouds (2025):

  Reality once removed is Cronenberg’s specialty: No filmmaker has ever been better in locating science fiction in the everyday, or observing the crimes of the future in the present. The Shrouds is stylized to the point of eccentricity, but it also plays eerily like a piece of vérité about a hyper-mediated world where focus and distraction exist in a mutual death grip and civilians become willingly imprisoned by their own devices. There are no voices of reason here. Everybody is paranoid, and everyone is an enabler: The currency of the internet realm is Loose Change (2005). Over forty years ago, in his masterpiece Videodrome (1983), Cronenberg channeled Marshall McLuhan’s philosophies into a trenchant satire-cum-critique of a rapidly mutating mediascape; The Shrouds is a thriller under the sign of Mark Fisher. It’s a secular ghost story about characters clutching at psychic shadows and chasing digital phantoms. Mesmerized by the spectacle of death at work, they can’t help haunting themselves.

• In 4Columns, Beatrice Loayza reviews Bonjour Tristesse (2025):

  There’s an artifice, a forced delicacy, to Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse that extends most egregiously to the dialogue, a collection of aphorisms—some more clever than others—meant to telegraph each woman’s wisdom and acuity: “Seasonal love can swallow you up,” Anne (Chloë Sevigny) tells Cécile (Lily McInerny). “It feels limitless, like a song.” If the novel lends itself to big, declarative statements about human nature, it’s by dint of its first-person narration (a conceit that Preminger’s film partially retains), which looks back on past events at a mournful, meditative remove, that this strategy works. Chew-Bose’s script, in discarding this charged, intimate point of view and choosing instead to drift in doting observation, loses the story’s guiding frictions—the cruelty and ambivalence of a girl on the cusp of womanhood confronting the possibility of change.

• In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri reviews Revenge of the Sith (2005):

  Maybe that’s why the prequels felt so messy. There was a tension throughout between the rip-roaring children’s fantasies the films wanted to be, the high-tech megahits they had to be, and the clearly personal visions Lucas needed them to be. We could feel the director trying to cram everything he could into these movies—and because they weren’t typical franchise fare managed by armies of executives, we could also see the seams. But this messiness turned out to be these pictures’ secret strength and the key to their lasting appeal. You can still behold it in Revenge of the Sith, the saddest and sincerest of all the Star Wars epics, the mad work of a man desperately trying to understand his own creation.

  [The Star Wars prequels walked so Megalopolis (2024) could run. —Steve]

Reviews of books:

• In the Journal, Donna Rifkind reviews Daniel Kehlmann’s novel about G. W. Pabst (The Director, translated by Ross Benjamin, May 6):

  The Director invites comparison with another novel about a devil’s bargain, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), which was written during the early 1940s when Mann lived in exile in Los Angeles. Doctor Faustus is often interpreted as an allegory for the rise of Nazism. Mann’s opus takes pains to portray its capitulating protagonist with layers of psychological complexity and context. By contrast, Mr. Kehlmann’s Pabst is a Faust stripped down to his mechanics: We see intimately and intricately how he surrenders, but we aren’t given much idea why.

  Some film scholars have concluded that Pabst took refuge in technique. Mr. Kehlmann seems to commiserate, perhaps because his own technical skill in converting cinematic cuts, close-up and tracking shots into a literary vocabulary is nothing short of brilliant. But there is a Pabst-size hole in this novel where the director’s essence ought to be, and in this way the author has given us a Faust legend for our own image-driven era: a queasy blend of reality and distortion that’s ambiguous but not nuanced, sophisticated but skin-deep.

N.B.:

• Why Wall Street loves Margin Call (2011).

• Why accountants love The Accountant (2016).

• An interview with Michael Mann.

• Quentin Tarantino’s acting credits.

• Ted Kotcheff died on Thursday, April 10. R.I.P.

Critical notes:

• In the Times, Brooks Barnes on new attempts to get people to go to the theater:

  Blumhouse, the horror studio affiliated with Universal Pictures, teamed with Meta to experiment with a technology called Movie Mate. It’s a chatbot that encourages people to tap, tap, tap on hand-held small screens as they watch films on a big one. Users gain access to exclusive trivia and witticisms in real time (synced with what’s happening in the movie). Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has positioned Movie Mate as a way “to get audiences back in theaters.”

  [I love the future, although the most horrifying thing here is a stat lower down: “20 percent of moviegoers ages 6 to 17 already send text messages during movies.” I have to imagine this was determined by a survey, which means that what we actually learn is this: 20 percent of moviegoers ages 6 to 17 do not see using their phones in the theater as something they should be embarrassed enough not to admit doing. —Steve]

• Max Horkheimer’s pitch to Fritz Lang for a film about Thomas More (h/t ):

  The dramatic core of the film might be the struggle between worldly interest, ulterior motives, craving for success,—all of them represented by his wife, Dame Alice,—and the love for truth and science, incorruptibility and devotion as represented by Mag, his daughter Margaret. The culmination of such contrast could be brought out when the two women visit More at his prison in the tower. His freedom then depended solely on the subordination of his conscience to his personal interest. He only had to recognize the king’s arbitrary act by which he added to his authority as the supreme leader of the state the highest spiritual authority, a truly totalitarian step. Despite Mag’s rational pleading with More that he may avoid death, she is all love and understanding for his argumentation. Dame Alice, however, exhibits the attitude of the vast majority of all people in all eras; she laughs at the one who stands by his conviction instead of saving his life.

  [I’m imagining a version of Contempt (1963) where this is the film Lang is directing. —Steve]

Movies across the decades:

Pride & Prejudice (dir. Joe Wright, 2005)

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Links:

• In Air Mail, on Joan Didion’s movie reviews:

  While not undiscerning, Didion had quite populist taste, and the more I read, the more often I disagreed. She declared that Billy Wilder, the director of Some Like It Hot (1959), had “only the most haphazard feeling for comedy”; that Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World (1963) was almost so bad as to “not be worth mentioning”; that Sidney Lumet’s films were “dutifully rendered and almost totally unfelt.” She wrote at length about how irritating it was to watch a movie in which an actor played against type, how frustrating crime movies were when they became “cast studies of deranged individuals in a sane society” rather than old-school gangster films.

  Like most movie critics, I disagree with critics—even the ones I think are great—all the time. So Didion’s film reviews intrigued me because they revealed a mindset about movies that you can trace through her later writing, heavily influenced by being brought up in the golden age of the big studios. To her (and to Dunne), movies were predominantly entertainment turned out by large-scale teams designed to tug at your emotions, rather than the gritty, artist-driven form that would come to dominate the New Hollywood.

  [Billy Wilder couldn’t catch a break from the auteurists—or their adversaries in that debate, apparently. —Steve]

• In The Nation, T. M. Brown on the decline of the paranoid thriller:

  “If the Sixties and early Seventies were, at least in part, periods of disillusionment, the late Seventies and Eighties brought a process of re-illusionment,” the film critic J. Hoberman wrote in Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan (2019).

  Hoberman’s book braids together the political, cultural, and cinematic threads of the 1970s and ’80s, using Reagan’s rise from B-list actor to governor of California to president of the United States as a guiding timeline. For Hoberman, movies like Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) represent not just a difference in artistic vision, but also a rift in philosophies that set the tone for national cinema. “Two kinds of filmmaking passed each other. . . . Nashville was intellectual and exclusive, Jaws visceral and populist; Nashville looked back to the 1960s, Jaws ahead to the 1980s,” Hoberman wrote. Jammed in the middle of these two divergent paths were films that tried to put a nation’s anxiety on the big screen. But that movement was short-lived, and the conspiratorial cinema from Pakula, Pollack, and Coppola was eventually metabolized by an industry and a country willing to forget the bad times.

• on Éric Rohmer:

  The moral of the story is not that it’s okay to fudge the truth a bit with your spouse in order to keep the peace. What interests Rohmer is the insincerity of Jean-Louis, a sneakily unsavory character who professes to be a hidebound moralist and then regularly updates his moral calculus whenever it behooves him to. This might be lost on viewers who reflexively want to equate Jean-Louis’s Catholicism with de facto moral uprightness, but others might be watching through their fingers. Identification with a Rohmerian protagonist is always a dangerous business. He/She’s just like me fr fr quickly turns into, oh God, am I really like that? What makes Rohmer’s movies work as well as they do is their gentleness toward human foibles (even the predatory behavior of the adults in Claire’s Knee (1970), who if anything he probably goes a little too easy on). The value in watching (and rewatching) Rohmer isn’t to get tidy lessons in right and wrong, nor even to learn how the world works necessarily, but to risk a bit of self-knowledge by seeing recognizable virtues and vices reflected back at you by an artist who approaches the human condition with endless curiosity rather than contempt.

  [Rohmer was one of the subjects of Movies across the decades in WRB—May 2023 Film Supplement. He doesn’t express any open contempt for awful men in Claire’s Knee, but in La collectionneuse (1967) he really lets them have it. —Steve]

• Alan Jacobs on sex and Cat People (1942):

  One last point, on a related matter. In the Lewton horror films of the Forties, there are several characters like Irena [in Cat People] (Simone Simon): let’s call this type the Unsuitable Wife, the woman who blocks the male lead from marrying the Normal Woman he loves and is obviously meant for. Oliver (Kent Smith) can’t marry sexy Alice (Jane Randolph) as long as sexless Irena is in the way. (The locus classicus for this theme is obviously Jane Eyre.)

  A different version of the same problem appears in I Walked with a Zombie (1943): poor Paul (Tom Conway) is clearly attracted to his wife’s nurse, but how to get rid of the wife? She’s a zombie, after all. Can’t have sex, or even companionship, with a zombie, and murdering her would be complicated—as well as immoral, of course. Jessica is not a zombie in the George Romero sense, but nevertheless is locked away in her own wing of a compound, sort of like Ed at the end of Shaun Of The Dead (2005) but not as much fun.

  [I Walked with a Zombie shares with Jane Eyre the association of the Unsuitable Wife with the Caribbean. (I wonder if Jean Rhys had seen it.) —Steve]

• on what David Lynch taught him about art:

  One of the things Lynch did for me, with his particularly distinctive and aggressive style, was to permanently cure me of any lingering notions that TV and film are sort of illustrated audiobooks, showing us in a basically neutral way what happens in the script. Lynch, because he is a genius stylist but also a very aggressive stylist, forces even an inexperienced viewer to realize that the way events are filmed is everything: camera placement, composition, blocking, color, lighting, sound, music, can tell us as much or more about the import of a scene or the relationships between characters and events as the dialogue or plot. Imagine that in the record player scene above, when Maddie (Sheryl Lee) moves to the couch, the camera follows her and frames the actors in a cozy three-shot, or follows a shot–reverse shot pattern. That would be a completely appropriate technique for a certain kind of scene, but it would not remotely be the same scene, affectively or narratively, even if every word of the script was the same. The reasons why these moments work as they do are mysterious, but the effect is direct and undeniable. As David Foster Wallace wrote in the aforementioned essay: “[Blue Velvet’s (1986)] obvious ‘themes’ . . . were for us less revelatory than the way the movie's surrealism and dream-logic felt: they felt true, real.”

  [While reading this I suddenly realized that the work of art that did the most to reveal to me how art works and how to think about it is “To His Coy Mistress.” (Specifically, a dramatic reading of it by my English teacher senior year of high school.) I then realized that this explains at least two-thirds of what is wrong with me. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In Liberties, Robert Rubsam reviews Nickel Boys (2024):

  Nickel Boys proceeds at the speed of his attention, a gaze which can be shy, curious, defensive, creative. Through him we see playgrounds, card games, kitchens, classrooms, a Malickian montage of private life lived against the backdrop of history and nature. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) notices especially those small details which a more typical narrative would excise as insignificant—a puddle, a flipbook, a girl’s loose shoelace—and then, with the dawning consciousness of an artist, spins them into moments of imagined synchronicity: the music made by a skipping record, two women stepping in unison across a shop floor. These moments run alongside and intertwine with the brutalities of Jim Crow, but are not reliant upon them, and Elwood’s political awakening is neither distinct from nor wholly determined by the ambit of his vision. Segregated Tallahassee is both beautiful and violent, with neither zeroing out the other.

• In the Times, reviews Eephus (2025):

  In fact, Eephus never foregrounds any particular plot point. The screenplay, written by Lund, Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, exists outside sports movie tropes altogether, though it’s most certainly a baseball movie. It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together, that introduce us to one another and that, in an age of optimized life choices and disappearing public spaces, are slowly fading away.

  That makes it sound very serious, which Eephus is not. The arc is simplicity itself: The teams gather to play the game, which goes much longer than they’d expected and then, at the end, they go home. In between, the men fret, spit, argue, josh around and occasionally hit the ball. They lament the end of their ball-playing era, but whenever someone brings up just playing on the field two towns over, they loudly and flatly refuse: That field’s no good and the town is lousy, too. (Their language is slightly stronger than what I can print here.)

  [The best movie I’ve seen in a theater so far this year, although I too am a New Englander with obscure and inarticulable resentments against places two towns over from where I grew up, and it was good to see my people represented. —Steve]

Reviews of books:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Geoffrey O’Brien reviews a book about Hollywood in the 1950s (Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher—Television, by Foster Hirsch, 2023):

  Even the most heroic or brilliant faced hopeless odds and irresistible cravings. The sight of John Wayne leaning on his saddle in The Searchers (1956), powerless to save his family from massacre, conveyed a pain beyond resolution. In Forbidden Planet (1956), Walter Pidgeon, as the marooned space explorer Dr. Morbius, could only murmur disconsolately “My poor Krell . . . ” upon grasping that the ancient superintelligent inhabitants of Altair-IV were annihilated by their unleashed unconscious urges—“Monsters from the Id!”—and sensing that his own repressions were putting his daughter in mortal danger. (In this outer space recasting of The Tempest, Prospero was Caliban.)

  Women fell apart too, but under different kinds of pressure. Age, to begin with: Bette Davis spent most of All About Eve (1950) preoccupied with her age (she was forty-two at the time), while Gloria Swanson (at fifty) retreated into delusion rather than face her decrepitude in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Stars of the Thirties and Forties were cast in deglamorized vehicles—Loretta Young as a housewife endangered by her psychotic husband in Cause for Alarm! (1951), Esther Williams as a sexually harassed schoolteacher in The Unguarded Moment (1956), Merle Oberon as the driver responsible for a hit-and-run accident in The Price of Fear (1956)—roles calling chiefly for various stages of panic. Their male counterparts (John Wayne, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Clark Gable) maintained an undiminished status.

  [Prospero was always Caliban (and, to be fair to him, Ariel)—“this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Thames, Alex Harvey reviews a collection about Powell and Pressburger (The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, edited by Claire Smith and Nathalie Morris, 2023):

  The self-referentiality of A Matter of Life and Death (1946) anticipates The Red Shoes (1948), with its reflection on the process (and the psychological cost) of making art and cinema. Like its predecessor, the film has two contrasting modes of representation. A fantasy ballet about a girl who is punished for surrendering to the lure of the Red Shoes is mirrored by a realist narrative, the story of an ambitious young dancer, Vicky Page (Moira Shearer), whose identity merges with the role she creates for the impresario Boris Lermontov, played to perfection by [Anton] Walbrook. Fantasy and realism permeate each other: Grishcha, Lermontov’s choreographer, becomes the mischievous Shoemaker; Vicky’s arrival at the wind-blown steps of Lermontov’s deserted villa is echoed by her fairy-tale entrance in the ballet. Powell in particular enjoyed collaborating with artists from different disciplines, and the dancers and choreographers in The Red Shoes—Moira Shearer, Léonide Massine and Robert Helpmann—play versions of themselves. Pressburger based the character of Lermontov on Diaghilev, but it also has elements of the imperious Korda, as well as both himself and Powell. “I live cinema,” Powell told the French director Bertrand Tavernier. “I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from this time on, my memories almost coincide with the history of the cinema . . . I am cinema. I grew up with and through the cinema.”

  [The Red Shoes was the subject of Movies across the decades in the inaugural Film Supplement.]

N.B.:

• Polaroids from the New Hollywood.

• Jason Statham’s jobs in movies.

• Soil in film.

• Some ideas to revive the movie theater:

  From selling pot along with popcorn to offering cellphone-friendly screenings, cinema owners could soon overhaul the way their customers watch films. These changes, many of them once considered sacrilegious, may give the box office a much-needed boost.

  [No. Absolutely not. —Steve]

• Val Kilmer died on Tuesday, April 1. R.I.P.

  • In The Ringer, Rob Harvilla:

    Val Kilmer as the most smoldering bank robber in world history in 1995’s Heat, smolderingly firing that machine gun like he was born with it, though for me it’s the far quieter moment when Robert De Niro calmly explains the whole tough-guy premise of the movie to him—Don’t let yourself get attached to anything that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner, et cetera—and Val’s soft, smoldering reply is “For me the sun rises and sets with her.” Everyone in my packed theater leaned forward to hear him better.

  • In The Bulwark, Sonny Bunch:

    The cast of Heat is no less impressive, though more succinctly summed up: Pacino vs. De Niro. And yes, both De Niro and Pacino deliver master class–caliber performances. But again, in this movie about alpha men and their relationship both to excellence at crime and incompetence at home, Kilmer is the bleeding heart of the film. He’s the one criminal who is able actually to fulfill Neil McCauley’s (De Niro) axiom: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” Few moments in film are as heartbreaking as when Kilmer’s Chris clocks his wife giving him the “run” signal and his face shifts from loving relief to the cold realization he’ll never see them again. As much as everyone loves the physicality Kilmer demonstrates in the Hollywood shootout scene—and as great as that is—it’s this moment of face-work that demonstrated why he was one of the best.

Movies across the decades:

Tombstone (dir. George P. Cosmatos, 1993)

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Links:

• In Air Mail, Alex Belth on editing Annie Hall (1977):

  Unsettled on an ending, Allen held a few screenings for small audiences to assess their reaction (a practice he did not continue). Back in the cutting room, Morse recalls, Rosenblum suggested the tone mirror the old Groucho Marx joke that started the movie (“I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member”). After swapping ideas back and forth, Rosenblum brought up a memory montage he’d cut in 1969’s Goodbye, Columbus, in which a scene of Richard Benjamin, dejected at the end of his friend’s wedding, flashes back to a highlight reel of scenes with Ali MacGraw. “That seemed to resonate with Woody,” says Morse.

  She pulled clips from 15 or 20 key sequences—cooking with lobsters on Long Island; meeting in the lobby of the gym after playing tennis; kissing at dusk with the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges in the background—and the memory montage was cut minutes later, with only Allen’s final voice-over remaining.

  Allen recorded the final monologue, an old joke about a man whose brother thinks he’s a chicken, at Magno Sound, at 49th Street and Seventh Avenue. “He didn’t tip his hand to any of us as to what he had in mind,” says Morse. “He simply stepped into the isolation booth where he watched the final scene of the film unspool and delivered the perfect ending. No rehearsal. One take.”

  [Annie Hall was one of the subjects of Movies across the decades in WRB—June 2023 Film Supplement. Marshall Brickman’s suggestion that the story of Annie Hall is that of Annie Hall’s coming of age is bizarre to me—if anything, it’s the story of Alvy Singer finally growing up. There’s a reason it starts with his childhood and not hers. —Steve]

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Éric Rohmer:

  Rohmer realized that the usual length of a film (90 minutes to two hours) did not suffice to enable narratives with the scope of a novel, an epic poem or a spectacular theatrical pageant. Instead, he aimed to create work on the scale of a short story, a lyric poem or a one-act play. When you describe the plots of his films, they sound intricately trivial, like eighteenth-century-style comedies of manners, or nineteenth-century boulevard farces, replete with slamming doors, scheming lechers and paranoid, hysterical cuckolds. Yet they all unfold at a gentle pace; Rohmer tells his stories in a manner that gives them a natural, almost documentary feel, so that you often cannot tell what has been scripted and what was merely improvised by the actors, or captured by chance on camera. Instead of action, there is a great deal of talk.

  [Rohmer was one of the subjects of Movies across the decades in WRB—May 2023 Film Supplement. Personally, I prefer to believe that France is just like that. —Steve]

• In Current, Hillary Weston interviews Peyton Reed:

  Weston: I’d love to know more about your relationship with romantic comedy and if this is a genre you’ve always been drawn to as a filmmaker and a viewer. It doesn’t always get the respect it deserves, despite having had such a deep cultural impact.

  Reed: I’ve always been a fan of romantic comedies, but they’ve frequently gone in and out of favor. I’m a huge Frank Capra fan, and a movie like It Happened One Night (1934) swept the Oscars and still really holds up and gives you everything you want out of a romantic comedy. It’s genuinely romantic, which is not something you can say about every movie of its kind, and it’s so clearly of its time. I find that romantic comedies are the best genre of movie to give you a window into attitudes of the era in which they were made.

  Down with Love (2003) is a love letter to the sex comedy. It was written by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, and their script was so particular about every reference and visual detail. They’re also both creatures of New York, and you could just feel that on the page. There was such passion in the writing, and I knew exactly what they were after. I bonded with them over our love for this subset of the romantic comedy, and I wanted to figure out what this kind of movie meant to modern audiences in 2003.

  [Imagine how much better things would be if everyone writing thinkpieces about the state of relationships between men and women were instead writing scripts for romantic comedies. Imagine if Hollywood made some of them too. Maybe we’re too far gone. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In 4Columns, Melissa Anderson reviews Earthlight (1970):

  Pierre (Patrick Jouané) declares himself “the man from nowhere,” at home neither in France nor Tunisia, most at ease when he knows he’s leaving one location for another. While his lack of attachment to place may leave him perpetually adrift, it also affords him a kind of freedom, untethered from sentimentality. He will never be doomed to fetishize the past, unlike his father, unlike Mme. Larivière (Edwige Feuillère), unlike a bearded habitué of that seedy Pigalle boîte who utters, “The district’s changing, it’s not like before. What fun we had.” While not beholden to memory, Pierre knows he’s not impervious to time. He hears clocks chiming everywhere, and, while crossing a bridge over the Seine, is moved to tears when he listens to a woman singing about all the quotidian actions that make up a day. This doleful yet beguiling film ends with a title card that reads simply “To be continued,” perhaps the most optimistic way of saying “Laughing, crying—time goes by anyway.”

• In The Nation, J. Hoberman reviews Hard Truths (2024):

  Having made a large-scale costume drama, albeit one focused on the English working class, Leigh has returned to the character-driven social realism of his earlier films. Not that Hard Truths is a comfortable film or a small one: However intimate, Leigh’s post-Peterloo (2018) movie has its own epic qualities. His use of careful wide-screen framing imbues this latest account of a dysfunctional family with a measure of tragic gravitas, although it is essentially the story of one cosmically unhappy person, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), introduced more or less as she goes about her day.

  If dinner with Pansy is a nonstop enraged monologue, a morning in her company is a mad adventure wherein she gratuitously insults the saleswoman (and two customers) in a furniture showroom, gets involved in a slanging insult fest in the parking lot, and causes an instant commotion on a supermarket checkout line.

  Initially funny in an outrageous, Marx Brothers sort of way, Pansy’s behavior is less so with regard to the medical professionals whose help she so obviously needs. Pansy rudely disrupts a physical exam—referring to the young doctor as “a mouse with glasses squeaking at me”—and terminates a trip to the dentist, screaming that she is being subjected to “torture” and that the treatment is “unacceptable.”

Reviews of books:

• In The American Scholar, Noah Isenberg reviews a book about Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg (Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation, by Kenneth Turan, February):

  Their individual reputations in the motion picture business, where the two officially joined forces at MGM for its auspicious launch in 1924, were appropriately distinct. Mayer “was a very impetuous man—given to sudden infatuations, temper outbursts, emotional moments,” remarked producer David Lewis—Mayer’s favorite diet, according to Hermann Mankiewicz, was “his fellow man.” By contrast, owing to his youthful demeanor, Thalberg was frequently mistaken—even by his own future wife, MGM star Norma Shearer—as an office boy. Vogue columnist Allene Talmey described the “boy producer” as “nervous, skinny, mostly dark eyes and no body.” A certain father-son dynamic took hold, replete with oedipal battles and internal clashes. “I can’t make stars as fast as L. B. can fire them,” Thalberg once rued. When, in a textbook case of Hollywood nepotism, Mayer snubbed Thalberg by allowing his son-in-law David O. Selznick to run his own unit, the press tagged the event “The Son-in-Law Also Rises.”

• In The Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs reviews a book about Terrence Malick (Terrence Malick and the Examined Life, by Martin Woessner, 2024):

  All that said, I will now risk my own use of Heidegger. One of that thinker’s most famous concepts is Geworfenheit (“thrownness”), the disorienting experience of being cast into a world and having to navigate it as best one can. Woessner invokes this notion, especially in relation to The New World (2005), which makes perfect sense, since to be among the first Europeans to visit the North American continent, or the first Native American to visit London, is to be “thrown” with a vengeance. Yet all Malick’s films seek to portray—not to describe but to portray—this condition, which combines wonderment, bewilderment, and alienation. A teenage girl on a road trip with her boyfriend, who has just murdered her father; a group of young men dumped from a transport ship onto a wild Pacific island occupied by Japanese soldiers; a Hollywood screenwriter whose life suddenly becomes incomprehensible to him; a farmer whose refusal to vow fealty to Adolf Hitler lands him in prison—these and many others are thrown, and by being thrown, are tested. How, the world asks them, will you respond to the challenge I offer you?

  [Days of Heaven (1978) goes even further and makes the world a secularized God; Bill (Richard Gere, never better) is forced to flee his home after killing a man (like Moses) and in exile attempts to pass his girlfriend off as his sister (like Abraham). —Steve]

N.B.:

• [I learned from this review of the new Malaparte biography (an Upcoming book in WRB—Feb. 22, 2025) that he built the villa that belongs to Prokosch in Contempt (1963). I don’t know what to do with this information, but I figured I’d pass it along. —Steve]

• A profile of Parker Posey.

• An interview with George Miller.

• An interview with Martin Scorsese.

• The number of trailers and ads theaters play before the movie has attracted the attention of a Connecticut state senator.

• Souleymane Cissé died on Wednesday, February 19. R.I.P.

• Michelle Trachtenberg died on Wednesday, February 26. R.I.P.

• Gene Hackman was found dead on Wednesday, February 26. R.I.P.

  • In the Times, Ben Stiller:

    Someone called for the actors. He got up to get ready for the shot. I sat alone for a moment, trying to figure how to take that. He had not felt the need to explain it or even acknowledge how good or bad he thought the movie was, or its impact on me. He just got up, as if it was no big deal; a conversation that might or might not continue. I sat there wrestling with this knowledge, that what had been one of the most formative performances in my young life, a performance that had moved me so much, had been some sort of a blip to him, a job to pay the bills.

    We got on the marks and we did the scene. My character opened up to him about having a difficult year, and he put his hand on my neck, and he looked at me, his eyes inches from mine, with a deep honesty and empathy, the powerful kind of look I had seen him give onscreen many times, and he said, “I know you have.” I believed him.

  • In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw:

    In the end, I keep coming back to his performance in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), one that builds on his reputation for potent, unimpressed no-bullshit men but doesn’t simply satirize or send up his former career. His tatty, double-breasted chalk-stripe suit, his cigarette in the holder, his glasses, his indomitable grin, even his slightly too long hair are all absolutely perfect—as is the moment when he finally has to swallow his pride and take a job at the Lindbergh Palace hotel, and wear the cheap-looking but strangely well-tailored uniform and cap. His line readings are perfection, especially when he talks to his bewildered grandchildren about their mother, his daughter-in-law, who has died in a plane crash: “Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.”

  • In Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz:

    That triptych of roles in politically adjacent genre movies—No Way Out (1987), The Birdcage (1996), and Absolute Power (1997)—is also a vivid illustration of what we might call the Gene Hackman Principle of Transformative Acting: The best special makeup is talent. He’s visually the same guy in all three movies, down to the suits and ties, but if you watch them in a row without knowing the plots going in, you could never guess what Hackman’s character was going to do based on what you’d seen last time. Each new assignment was a chance to revisit the familiar and make it feel brand new. The patriarch Royal Tenenbaum summed up that brand of creative chaos in the “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” montage, where he resolves to show his sheltered grandsons how not to play it safe, dropping g’s by the handful: “I’m not talkin’ about dance lessons! I’m talkin’ about puttin’ a brick through the other guy’s windshield. I’m talking about takin’ it out and choppin’ it up!”

  • In The Bulwark, :

    Hackman slid easily back and forth between hero and villain; his whole career was painted in shades of gray. And while Hackman could undoubtedly ham it up—he remains the definitive live-action Lex Luthor for a reason—he imbued his characters with a sly subtlety that could leave audiences unsure where to fall. That mode practically defines the roles he took on in the last decade or so of his career, starting with Unforgiven (1992). Given that the film stars Clint Eastwood, it’s easy to forget that he, technically, is the outlaw in that picture. Hackman’s Little Bill is the face of law and order, though not justice. He’s just a semi-retired lawman trying to maintain order in a frontier town; if some whores get cut up, that’s worth a few horses to their employer, not burning down the whole town in vengeance. Again, there’s that sly, knowing smile, one he spent decades perfecting: He deploys it before defanging English Bob (Richard Harris) because he knows he has the goods and Bob, who spends Independence Day yammering about the glory of royalty, doesn’t.

  • In The Ringer, Brian Phillips:

    Hackman, by contrast, drew you in by holding back. Even when he was playing a loudmouth or a bully, he always held something in reserve, and because he was so naturally gifted, this felt like an act of generosity rather than stinginess. He didn’t have to overpower you or cow you into submission, the way Cruise or Jack Nicholson or even Humphrey Bogart might. He had a trick of making room: for you, for the story, for the world outside. There was something almost restful about watching him, because he never approached a movie like it was a battle he needed to win. It sounds strange to say that his fundamental quality as an actor was courtesy, but there was something essentially courteous about the way he watched and listened and modulated himself. Movies breathed more freely, always, when he was in them.

Critical notes:

• on movie run times:

  To the extent that tentpoles were getting (varying quality notwithstanding) long for long’s sake in the early 2020s, variables have changed. When studios expected or implicitly wanted viewers to watch The Batman (2022) on HBO Max, letting Matt Reeves’ Caped Crusader melodrama run as long as The Godfather (1972) A) could be sold as an art > commerce win and B) was less of an issue with folks pausing or breaking it into three “episodes” at home. With the industry (re)learning that cash-in-hand theatrical revenue > non-transactional SVOD viewership, I’d expect to see even tentpole runtimes closer to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) (126 minutes) than Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) (160 minutes). Another factor, namely that those AMC and Regal pre-show reels (trailers, commercials and those uh . . . absolutely critical promos for the very theater chain you’ve already chosen) run so damn long (25-30 minutes) that even a two-hour movie in theaters (with before/after transportation) can become a three-hour-plus commitment.

Movies across the decades:

The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

Read more

Links:

• In Arc, Allan Appel on religion in horror:

  At this moment in [Heretic (2024)], something notable happens: Grant’s voice drops an octave, and the creepy soundtrack-locks grinding, water dripping, sudden shifting house noises-all that ceases for the first time, in a genre film dependent on sound for its effects. The movie is saying, right here, Pay attention. Also gone for an instant is the manipulating, honeyed tone in Grant’s voice, as he says, in a tone that actually reveals his humanity for the first time, “Yes, to choose is horrible.”

  Call me an aficionado of cinematic theological horror, of a kind in which the writer and director take enough time to limn religious positions, so that spiritual certainties can become unsettled. Such films don’t make it easy for you; they respect and elevate both faith and doubt and also suggest, strongly, that unless you can find a way to embrace a bit of each, you're headed for the basement. And except for Heretic, I can’t think of another film, certainly not in the horror genre, that has all these pleasures. So bring on the Latter-day Saint horror movies (and the Jewish, Muslim, Baptist, and Shaker). Somebody has to rescue horror from the Catholics.

  [We linked to a review of Heretic in WRB—Dec. 2024 Film Supplement. As someone who grew up about half an hour from Sabbathday Lake I can confirm that it would be a good location for a horror movie. —Steve]

• In The Point, Barry Schwabsky on the connection between Pasolini’s fiction and films:

  It was with cinema more than fiction that Pasolini would discover a completely satisfactory poetry of presence. The dreamlike intensity of a cinematic image was, he believed, “profoundly poetic; a tree photographed is poetic because physicality is poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a sign of a linguistic system. Because who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself.” Already in reviewing Ragazzi di vita (1955), Fortini had perceived “a Cinerama”—that is, an ultra-widescreen film projection—“meant to convey an illusion of physicality, of truthfulness.” It’s remarkable that, at a time when linguistics, semiotics and structuralism were claiming to demystify language, Pasolini sought a way to use sign and system to reveal the transcendent. And it’s noteworthy, as well, that he take as his example of the cinematic image something as static as a tree; it’s a reminder that his cinema is one of icons more than of actions.

  [We linked to a review of a translation of one of Pasolini’s novels in WRB—Oct. 21, 2023.]

Reviews:

• In The Nation, Sam Adler-Bell reviews A Complete Unknown (2024):

  Perhaps the movie is less like a Disney ride and more like that other lucrative Disney amusement: the superhero movie. One need not catch every reference to follow the film; but for fans of the Dylan Extended Universe, there are Easter eggs galore! When Bob buys an Acme whistle on the street several scenes before recording “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan nerds are supposed to relish the moment—there it is! The whistle! Just like on the record!—as if we’re watching Thor brandish his hammer or Captain America his shield. (This is perhaps no coincidence, given that Mangold has directed several X-Men films.)

  Opinions may differ, but I don’t enjoy being infantilized in this way. “Fan service” is a sickening, adolescent ordeal. If a film aspires to be art, it cannot possibly succeed through flattery—i.e., by showing us stuff we already know. “That’s the problem with a lot of things these days,” Dylan grouses in The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022). “Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything. All songs are about one thing and one thing specifically, there is no shading, no nuance, no mystery. Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs.” The old man is right. And the same can be said for movies.

  [A Complete Unknown prefers to engage with Dylan on the fan service level; it will show you the whistle in “Highway 61 Revisited,” but it will not show you “My Back Pages” as a pre-electric sign that Dylan would not be what they wanted him to be. That would have required more thought. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Andrew Katzenstein reviews Hard Truths (2024):

  It’s to his credit that Hard Truths ends without a resolution. Rather than leave, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) kicks Curtley (David Webber) out of their bedroom, dumping his clothes in the hallway and making him sleep on the couch. The next day he returns home from work after suffering a possibly career-ending back injury. We don’t see whether Pansy goes downstairs to help him or whether she stays shut up in her room. Reconciliation seems impossible at this point, but so does the prospect of Pansy striking out on her own. In the cemetery she tells Chantelle (Michele Austin) that she wants her life to be different but also that she’s “so tired. . . . I just want to lie down and close my eyes.” There may be no escape for Pansy, just the pleasure of raging against her lot from time to time.

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews Grand Theft Hamlet (2025):

  To an extent, Grand Theft Hamlet is picking up where Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) left off. The sight of DJPhil whipping out a shotgun, rather than a foil, reminded me instantly of the gonzo scene at a gas station in Luhrmann’s film, when the anachronism of Benvolio’s line “Put up your swords” is swept aside by a closeup of the maker’s mark on a handgun—“Sword 9mm Series S.” But Crane and Grylls, I suspect, are onto something more than the buzz of a smart historical update. Consider the moral environment of G.T.A., where cruelty is funny and where malignity, more often than not, springs from the daftest and the most fleeting of motives and leaves no lasting trace. Might that actually be near as we’re likely to get to the mood of the mob, in theatres and other pits of revelry, in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England? We may be baffled by a public that rejoiced in the baiting of bears. But what would Shakespeare’s contemporaries make of us as we sit in front of a little window, in the warmth of our own homes, and watch puppetlike people blast one another in the head?

  [“Has it ever occurred to you that today, looked at from William Shakespeare’s perspective, would look even worse?” —Steve]

• In Angelus, Joseph Joyce reviews Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (2024):

  Part of their hesitation lies in wondering if they’re the butt of the joke. Between interviews with the musicians are talking head segments with critics and cultural commentators, who are all well-meaning Los Feliz types who have long lost track of the line between irony and sincerity. I am on the brink of my 30s but still cower in fear when high-schoolers laugh in my vicinity; I suspect the same dynamic is at play. When a man in a Ninja Turtles T-shirt insists you’re cool, you can’t help but speculate what curve he’s grading on.

  Somewhere in the goofy name and ironic appreciation and fake mustaches, their actual artistry is lost in the shuffle. The documentary does them justice there, demonstrating their chops and how much hard work it takes to create soft rock, how much effort goes into sounding easygoing.

  [“Kulee Baba / Coming your way / Every Sunday / Live from nowhere” —Steve]

N.B.:

• Hugh Grant interviews Renée Zellweger.

• An interview with Lucy Liu.

• David Lynch died on Wednesday, January 15. R.I.P. [You could read the Times obituary linked there, but why not read instead the Bob’s Big Boy obituary:

  The innovative American filmmaker is known for his visually-arresting aesthetics and non-linear storytelling. David Lynch’s films tend to either enthuse, or conversely, confuse. “You’re a madman. I love you!” said Mel Brooks. “What’s happening?” said most of the American public.

  One thing everyone can agree upon is David Lynch would lunch late at 2:30pm while enjoying coffee and chocolate milkshakes at Bob’s Big Boy Burbank. The resulting buzz from the sugar and caffeine would lead to many of his ideas, which were jotted down on Bob’s Big Boy napkins.

  I think Lynch would like it more. —Steve]

  • Erik Baker in The Nation:

    Lynch’s work is unsettling precisely because it gives us the world we inhabit in ways that help us recognize it as the nightmare it so often is. The world he presents us is uncanny in the sense Freud exposited: unheimlich, un-homely. Lynch’s affection for The Wizard of Oz (1939) is well known and his art too tells us that there’s no place like home. But it is art for people who don’t realize they are in Oz, people who wrongly believe they are home when they have never really been there.

  • Richard Brody in The New Yorker:

    Lynch, more than any filmmaker of his time, faced down carefully argued lies and reckoned with the burden of alienated identities. Many films are called revelatory and visionary, but Lynch’s films seem made to exemplify these terms. He sees what’s kept invisible and reveals what’s kept scrupulously hidden, and his visions shatter veneers of respectability to depict, in fantasy form, unbearable realities.

  • Manohla Dargis in the Times:

    By contrast, I saw and still see these images—even the cruelest, most debased and outwardly offensive ones—as raw and unflinchingly honest. Many filmmakers try to disguise their less socially acceptable prejudices, their impolite fears, dislikes and worse, but Lynch always seemed unafraid or maybe uninterested or just unaware about what others thought of his uglier visions.

  • Matt Feeney in UnHerd:

    At some point while watching a Lynch work, I’m typically struck with the marvelous fact that he wrote all this down. For us in the audience, simply intuiting his uncanny linkages feels vaguely miraculous: “I don’t know how, and yet I do know how.” We couldn’t reproduce this stuff in conscious terms if we tried, much less scheme it out in the first place. And yet Lynch made whole screenplays of it.

  • Joseph Joyce in Angelus:

    Lynch also believed in such trifles like family and friendship, which is why he spent most of his films trying to destroy them. To Lynch, these things above all else held power, and threats to them were the only story that mattered. They were the bulwark against the forces of evil, and if they were broken (or, God forbid, infiltrated) then nothing stood in the path of destruction. A character in his Twin Peaks once said his greatest fear was that Love was not enough, a thought that haunts the rest of his work.

  • Beatrice Loayza in 4Columns:

    This has less to do with his particular narrative obsessions (women in trouble, cops and hit men and mobsters caught in Manichean struggles) than his insistence that we connect to works of art by purely intuitive forces—thus his famously terse and blank-faced interviews when asked to talk about his films. For Lynch, the most powerful images throw us back into the shock, wonder, and confusion of our greenest years, when everything in the world seemed to be happening for the first time.

  • Kyle MacLachlan in the Times:

    It’s why David was not just a filmmaker: He was a painter, a musician, a sculptor and a visual artist—languageless mediums.

    When you are outside language, you are in the realm of feeling, the unconscious, waves. That was David’s world. Because there’s room for other people—as the listeners, the audience, the other end of the line—to bring some of themselves.

  • Adam Nayman in The Ringer:

    With Lynch, it wasn’t just about seeing his movies, but living with them for days, and weeks, and years as they sat on your shoulder, making their way slowly up the back of your neck, through your ear and into your mind’s eye. The scenes don’t go away, even the ones you sometimes wish would. You can’t get rid of a Lynch movie, but it’s never quite yours, either.

  • Max Nelson in Sidecar (the NLR blog):

    Somehow a local, small-town atrocity has ended up throwing a great deal more out of order, rendering it all “not the way it is supposed to be.” If there is a utopian sensibility running through Lynch’s films, it is here—in this boyish, inchoate, but touchingly stubborn intuition that a single woman’s suffering can tear the fabric of the world.

  • Derek Robertson in the Washington Examiner:

    It would also be insufficient given his name itself became synonymous with his own particular brand of weirdness: “Lynchian,” since at least the early 1990s, has served as shorthand for art that highlights the perversion and weirdness underpinning American life. That weirdness, more often than not, was an aesthetic wrapper for the Capra-esque moral rectitude expressed in his work, which was strengthened, not undermined, by how viscerally he depicted nightmarish violence, anguish and disorientation.

  • in The Bulwark:

    Even in a film set in the real world, something new, mysterious, and probably disturbing, on levels both obvious and hidden, was just around the corner, or just down that path, or just next door.

  • Armond White in National Review:

    Later, with the nightmare surrealism of Mulholland Drive (2001), Lynch would expose the soul-destroying nature of Hollywood. And his finest work, the 1990 television soap opera Twin Peaks, could also be considered a sensitive, comedic Rorschach test, given its all-American grotesqueries—the definition of his artistic expression.

  • Muriel Zagha in Engelsberg Ideas:

    Mel Brooks memorably described David Lynch as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”: the archetypal American nice guy, but from another planet. In Lynch’s universe both Bedford Falls and Pottersville, Oz and Kansas exist alongside one another, always capable of bleeding into each other. From this originate Lynch’s films-as-waking-dreams and his Heaven-and-Hell vision of America.

Critical notes:

• In Prospect, Imogen West-Knights on subtitling and dubbing:

  I suspect that dubbing will eventually win out over subtitles, because a lot of people, myself included, increasingly like to multitask. In these cases the shows I was watching were somewhat hard to follow (or, in Dark’s case, very hard to follow—it introduced an alternate universe on top of the time travel in season three), so when I was watching them, I was really, 100 percent watching them. I was not looking at my phone or cooking or having a conversation. But sometimes I do like to be doing these things, when I’m watching something more familiar or more easily understood. Is this a shame? That we pay less attention to the things we watch? Yes, I think so. But it is the way things are now.

  [Maybe we should all just pack up and go home. —Steve]

Movies across the decades:

Groundhog Day (dir. Harold Ramis, 1993)

[In lieu of adding to the appreciations of David Lynch above, I figured I should look at another film about a very strange American life under an unassuming facade. —Steve]

Read more

[A brief note: in the interest of freeing up more of my time each month, the Film Supplement will no longer feature capsule reviews of (almost) everything in theaters. All the other sections will remain as they have been. As always, thank you for reading. —Steve]

Links:

• In The New Yorker, Helen Shaw on Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare in the ’80s and ’90s:

  Branagh’s masterpiece is set at an Italian villa; he and Thompson play Benedick and Beatrice. It’s both good Shakespeare and good filmmaking. The movie starts at a drowsy hilltop picnic, which is interrupted when a prince (Denzel Washington, magnificent) and his military entourage—including Branagh and Keanu Reeves, as the duke’s bad-hearted brother—ride into view, galloping up the Tuscan road in thrilling slow motion. The picnickers come tumbling down the hillside to meet them, the women shrieking in delight. The soldiers tear off their blue-and-white uniforms and leap into an outdoor fountain to bathe; the camera dashes inside the villa to see the women throw their own white summer shifts in the air. Already, before the play starts, everyone is flinging themselves into love.

  In Branagh’s hands, Much Ado was joyful and accessible and intoxicatingly romantic—I think it’s the best film yet made of any Shakespeare comedy. Many performances are career peaks: Thompson is luminous; Branagh plays Benedick with exquisite finesse, a sly operator who secretly wants to get caught. Amid the loveliness, though, you can see the beginnings of what would be Branagh’s downfall with this kind of material—a penchant for casting big box-office names, whether they could handle the verse or not. (Keanu, bless him, was a nay.)

  [Branagh’s Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and Hamlet (1996) were the subject of Movies across the decades in WRB—Oct. 2023 Film Supplement. The problem with his Much Ado is that he has no idea what to do when the play gets dark; then again, I’m not quite sure Shakespeare did either. In any case Branagh and Thompson sell the whole thing so well that you only notice later. I cannot prove this, but I suspect that Éric Rohmer had Branagh’s Much Ado somewhere in mind when making A Tale of Autumn (1998), which may be the only film to capture the whole spirit of Wild Bill’s best comedic work. —Steve]

• In The Dispatch, Nick Ripatrazone on The Godfather films as immigrant narrative:

  The Corleones of The Godfather films certainly pay that price in tears and suffering—family tension, social ambition, and even violence haunt their lives. It’s important to remember, though, how these qualities are all tied to their tenuous American identities. However American they become, they will always be immigrants.

  “I believe in America” are the first words spoken in The Godfather (1972), the start of a plea by Amerigo Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) for Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) to exact revenge for the assault of Amerigo’s daughter. “America has made my fortune. And I raised my daughter in the American fashion,” Amerigo says. After two men “beat her, like an animal,” he “went to the police, like a good American.” Yet the men were only handed a suspended sentence. Instead, Amerigo told his wife, “for justice, we must go to Don Corleone.”

• In The New Statesman, Susie Goldsbrough on journalists in the movies:

  Some of the greatest examples of the genre recognize this—think of Howard Hawks’ 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday, a marital meltdown set in a newsroom that sizzles with self-interest and desire. But in recent years, the vibe has shifted towards the self-congratulatory. Some of the most admired modern journalism movies get away with this because the specific reporting they dramatise is unusually challenging and momentous. Take Tom McCarthy’s 2015 drama Spotlight, about the Boston Globe’s dogged investigation into sexual abuse within the Catholic church, or Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film The Post, in which Washington Post editors risk prison to publish the Pentagon Papers.

  The stories are legitimately worthy but they are told with a sense of unease. You can feel it in the lavish way the filmmakers slather on the corn syrup, as though to suppress their doubts with exaggerated certainty. Think of Tom Hanks’ Post editor growling, “If we don’t hold them accountable, who will?” Or Rachel McAdams’ Globe reporter earnestly assuring a skeptical source, “We’re gonna tell this story, we’re gonna tell it right.” It’s compulsory for at least one journalist to stand up and insist that what they’re doing is difficult, important, or brave. You have to wonder who they are trying to convince.

• In the Financial Times, Jonathan Romney on Luchino Visconti:

  Visconti’s attraction to beauty was visceral, according to Rocco and His Brothers (1960) actress Adriana Asti, who said, “When confronted with beauty, he went almost blind.” Such overwhelming effect is dramatized in Visconti’s penultimate film Conversation Piece (1974), an absurdist home invasion drama, with Berger’s character entrancing Burt Lancaster’s hermit-like professor. According to Lancaster, this was very much an autobiographical work: Visconti told him, “It’s my life, I’m a very lonely man.”

  As for hysteria, the word one can’t avoid with Visconti is “operatic”. Indeed, as a director of opera on stage, he was celebrated for renewing the art form, not least in his collaborations with Maria Callas. Senso (1954) begins at a performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore, prefiguring the intrigue that follows, which merges private passion with the turmoil of historical change in the Risorgimento. Visconti’s films gravitate towards moments of ferocious dramatic and emotional discharge: Rocco and His Brothers contains an act of sexual violence shocking for the cinema of the time and still profoundly distressing to watch.

  [Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) was the subject of Movies across the decades in WRB—Sept. 2024 Film Supplement.]

• In The Baffler, John Semley on the late style of legendary directors:

  These films are not terminal, funerary statements—or the death rattle of the medium itself. They are new movies. And their newness suggests that, even as a class of hyper-prolific and canon-defining artists fade into the twilight, cinema may still offer fresh possibilities. But if I’m being honest, this charming sentiment scrapes against the industrial and cultural realities. Box office receipts are not a metric of a movie’s quality, but they are a fair metric of public (dis)interest. Coppola’s auteurist passion project bombed; the latest film by David Cronenberg had trouble securing a North American distributor; ninety-four-year-old Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 (one of the year’s best) was all-but suppressed from release in American cinemas, at the behest of Warner Bros.’ current know-nothing-in-chief, David Zaslav. Notably, of Coppola, Leigh, Schrader, Cronenberg, and Godard, it is the Americans whose late films, and the press surrounding them, seem most terminal. Their final films seem pitched as the curtain call for movies themselves. But the idea that the cinema is dying as these old (American) masters fade into the twilight feels pathological, and indicative of a great hubris. It’s a type of ladder-pulling that is a generational defect of so many boomers. Having lived through, and made, history, they’re now packing it up and taking it with them. Hearing them whine about the death of cinema is like listening to a greybeard in a Jerry Garcia-branded necktie wax nostalgic about Woodstock. It’s an offense to younger filmmakers, and moviegoers, and those who can’t afford to lose faith in the medium.

  [Megalopolis (2024) was one of the subjects of Movies across the decades in WRB—Oct. 2024 Film Supplement.]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Katie Kadue reviews Gladiator II (2024):

  In Gladiator II, no one understands the real Rome better than Macrinus, the best foreign former slave who rises to the most powerful role in the Roman Empire through manipulation and murder since Titus Andronicus’ Aaron. Aaron, a Moor captured by Titus who spends the play wreaking his revenge, gets the best lines—an antiracist ode to blackness; a memorable “your mom” joke—and, like Washington’s Macrinus, is clearly having the most fun. Like Aaron, Macrinus has the ear of a pair of royal party boy brothers; like Aaron, his superiority to the idiot degenerates in power is signaled both by his strategic intelligence and by his superior knowledge of Latin poetry. (At a crucial moment, Aaron recognizes a line from Horace; Macrinus clocks couplets from Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid.) And like Aaron, he meets his downfall at the hands of a presumptive restorer of the Roman dream named Lucius. In his fluency in the universal language of violence, the foreigner is more Roman than the Romans. As Macrinus tells Lucilla, wrapping up the villain origin story that began with his enslavement to her father, where else but in Rome could someone like him achieve so much?

  [We linked to a previous review in WRB—Dec. 2024 Film Supplement.]

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Muriel Zagha reviews Juror #2 (2024):

  Darkness looms large in Juror #2, both without and within the character of Justin (Nicholas Hoult). Alternating with daytime scenes set either outdoors or in the courtroom, bathed in shades of Indian-summer sun, the nocturnal scenes are, for the main part, flashbacks to the night of Kendall Carter’s death. The initial flashback, when we see the neon sign for the fateful roadside bar Rowdy’s Hideaway turn from monochrome to red as the scene changes to color, is at once enchanting and ominous because it is a familiar trope of film noir, an American cinematic genre that flourished in the 1940s and ’50s and inhabits a fallen universe of losers who struggle with their fate, lurching disastrously from bad decision to bad decision. Film noir is suffused with the ineluctability of tragedy transposed into an American context. Edward G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945) is an emblematic example of the genre, with its flashback narrative, roadside-diner setting, ill-fated encounters and anti-hero vainly struggling to avoid disaster. In Juror #2, when the scene of the crime is summoned out of the past and Justin, along with the other members of the jury, travels back to a few crucial moments before his own irretrievable act, the irony of his predicament is gradually revealed. It is precisely when trying, like Oedipus at the crossroads, to bypass what he fears may be his destiny—in his case the temptation of relapse—that Justin ends up a killer.

  But as the story develops and as Justin, while simultaneously trying to shield himself and to save the defendant from a life sentence, is called upon to examine and probe himself, becoming his own juror (an effect of doubling suggested, perhaps none too subtly, by the title), he remains ambivalent even to himself. That is because Juror #2 may belong, rather than to the straightforward category of forensic courtroom drama, to another genre, that of a dyed-in-the-wool morality tale of intense American hue.

  [It’s true that many noirs feature anti-heroes vainly struggling to avoid disaster, but Detour isn’t really one of them; there the anti-hero thinks he’s struggling against his fate while actually resigning himself to it. There isn’t a way out for him because he isn’t trying very hard to look for one. In this he has something in common with Justin. —Steve]

• In The Ringer, Adam Nayman reviews The Brutalist (2024):

  What makes [Paul Thomas] Anderson a great filmmaker is his elastic mastery of tone, which allows him to stretch anxiety and aggression into unexpected directions. Corbet has a similar interest in historical research and world-building from the ground up, but he isn’t nearly as dexterous a dramatist, and he keeps betraying his heavy hand. The film’s show-stopping aerial point of view shot that renders an explosive tragedy at a clinical distance is meant to charge the story with cosmic significance, but it merely heralds The Brutalist’s unfortunate slide into detached and desultory abstraction, the telltale sign of a director aiming so high that he ends up hovering above the material as well as the audience. A grim narrative detour during Laszlo (Adrien Brody) and Harrison’s (Guy Pearce) second-act visit to Italy pays off the section’s title—“The Hard Core of Beauty”—while piling on shock tactics. Corbet’s metaphors become veritable meta-fives. (Or, to put it another way, The Brutalist’s pale, pachyderm aspects trample all over the termite-like tenacity of its production.)

• reviews All We Imagine as Light (2024):

  I thought a lot about realism as I watched All We Imagine as Light—about what it is, where its borders are and how artificial they might be; about how devotion to realism might license ventures into something beyond realism. About how the very pressure of that devotion to realism might allow a scene to flip into the surreal, if we can mean by that a realism so heightened (sur-réel) it transgresses what we usually think of as the limits of the real. The climax of Kapadia’s film comes in the aftermath of the loudest, the most dramatic event of the film, when a man is found unconscious, apparently drowned, on the beach. (When we see him, he seems to be wrapped in netting, perhaps suggesting that some fishermen have dragged him ashore; the film doesn’t worry about these logistics.) Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is sitting at a little cantina on the beach; alerted by shouts from the water’s edge, she runs to help. For all her reserve, she quickly asserts authority; the men surrounding the drowned man step back. The man is unknown, he isn’t a local—“he’s not one of ours,” one voice says. Prabha kneels, checks for a pulse, performs CPR, revives him; the gathered crowd applauds. At Prabha’s direction, they carry the man to the village doctor.

N.B.:

• An interview with Robert Eggers.

• A choral ode of Euripides in Conan the Barbarian (1982).

• on Bob Dylan’s cinematic history.

• Putting movies in theaters is good business. [They should let me run a studio. —Steve]

• Disputes between the Broccoli family and Amazon over James Bond.

• Olivia Hussey died on Friday, December 27. R.I.P.

Critical notes:

• Will Tavlin on Netflix cinema:

  Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish (2024). “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)

  One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.

  [Reminiscent of the piece about “ghost artists” on Spotify in the most recent Harper’s: “paying attention to something” is apparently a dying concept. —Steve]

• The on myths about the entertainment industry:

  In some ways, I think pundits are being unintentionally elitist; they hate [IP and franchise] films, but don’t want to blame the average person for liking them, so they have to come up with some external reason (like late-stage capitalism on the left or decadence on the right) to explain why viewers keep watching them, instead of blaming viewers themselves.

  [ESG is right about the elitism, but it’s specifically anti-elitism as elitism: something along the lines of “I may disdain all this slop, personally, but for you to watch it is a perfectly legitimate choice, just as legitimate as mine, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a snob.” —Steve]

  • , making the same point a bit differently:

    Hollywood just keeps everything running on a low simmer. They’re making Venom 4. They’re hard at work on Kung Fu Panda 5. It’s easy to blame all of this on the studios. Somehow, the job of making films has gone to people who don’t seem particularly interested in making films. They’d rather perform sweatshop labor: performing the same action over and over again, all day, every day. But to be honest, the real culprits here are you, the viewers. You didn’t have to watch Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024). Nobody forced you to go and see the remake of Mean Girls (2024) or the remake of Wonka (2023) or a back-to-basics Alien movie that repeats the original without being nearly as good. You can’t have good art without a good audience, and the audiences are awful. The only thing you’re looking for is the comfort of a familiar, repetitive experience. You want art to make you feel cosy and safe. Instead of a hundred billion dollar industry, you could get the same experience by rigging up the mechanism in a metronome to gently thwack you with a paddle every three seconds. You disgust me.

    [Another dying concept alongside “paying attention to something” is “having expectations.” Also, Kriss’ prediction that a romantic comedy called The IKEA Billy Bookcase Movie will come out this year will be incorrect; in 2025 major studios will no longer make any romcoms. —Steve]

• A list of Steve’s top ten movies of 2024 [I didn’t see everything, but I did see a whole lot. —Steve]:

10. Sing Sing (dir. Greg Kwedar)

“O God, I could be bounded in Sing Sing, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” Colman Domingo deserves Best Actor awards for his performance.

9. Civil War (dir. Alex Garland)

Alex Garland’s vicious portrayal of journalists’ self-importance, ignorance, and impotence in the face of the much more powerful forces they cover—made without him realizing that he was making such a thing.

8. Juror #2 (dir. Clint Eastwood)

It is said that by the end of his life St. John merely repeated “Little children, love one another.” Clint Eastwood is welcome to reiterate his life’s work with equal simplicity.

7. Hit Man (dir. Richard Linklater)

Actors are like hit men. They only exist in movies. What are they like in real life? Nobody knows and it doesn’t matter. Least of all to them. That’s what acting’s for.

6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (dir. George Miller)

Furiosa’s wrath, to Oz the direful spring
Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!

5. The Beast (dir. Bertrand Bonello)

Is love real? Films very loosely adapted from Henry James are, in any case. We were James characters when he was writing; we are now; we will be in the future.

4. Anora (dir. Sean Baker)

An outer-borough fairy tale for the titular stripper Cinderella (Mikey Madison, who deserves Best Actress awards), an object lesson in what money can and can’t buy, and an excellent example of the WRB’s favorite genre: films about a romantic relationship involving a guy who sucks a lot.

3. Megalopolis (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

2. Hundreds of Beavers (dir. Mike Cheslik)

Comedy is hard because coming up with a funny joke is hard. Coming up with ten funny jokes a minute for 108 minutes, as this does, is near-impossible. Are many of them stolen from silent movie slapstick and Looney Tunes? Yes. Great artists steal.

1. The Taste of Things (dir. Trần Anh Hùng)

[I find it difficult to write about this film. The first time I saw it, I knew it was something I’d been waiting for my whole life, and I loved it so much I ended up going to see it in theaters five times. Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche are perfect as two people who have devoted their lives to the quiet and unrewarding work of making and sharing gourmet cuisine with their friends. Tradition, beauty, and love are all, in the end, found in the unglamorous day-in-day-out commitment to the task, one done not just for themselves but for others. But the Managing Editor of the WRB would say that.

I really can’t recommend it enough; it would be on a list of my ten favorite films, period. You owe it to yourself to watch it. —Steve]

Movies across the decades:

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1922), Nosferatu the Vampyre (dir. Werner Herzog, 1979), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1992), Nosferatu (dir. Robert Eggers, 2024)

Read more

Links:

• In Lit Hub, an excerpt from Tim Robey’s book about Hollywood flops (Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops, November) about Babe: Pig in the City (1998):

  “That’ll do, pig” from Farmer Hoggett was the first film’s motto, but when it’s trotted out at the end here, with Babe safely back at the farm, it plainly doesn’t work. Our pig’s various acts of kindness, such as saving the bull terrier and goldfish from near-certain death, have gone without human notice at any stage. If Babe’s (1995) a round hole, with its human-porcine teamwork, Pig in the City is far too square a peg to get away with the pretense that it’s about the same things. It’s about other things instead—mainly, the heroism of lending a hand when there’s no one watching.

  None of these considerations caused it to flop, though. Be­yond the poorly planned release and too-late flurries of studio panic—over legitimate issues that ought to have been addressed far sooner—it conveys so little desire to mollify its intended audience that they blatantly smelled a rat. Particularly in the US, newspa­per reports raising eyebrows at lofty ambitions (“Felliniesque,” “much darker in tone”) rarely fail to put off wary consumers, who paid more attention to the bad press hounding the film than the decent clutch of impassioned reviews. It fared better abroad—but not nearly well enough to erase the taint of a serious failure.

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Beatrice Loayza on Catherine Breillat:

  Marie (Caroline Ducey), in Romance (1999), seems to speak for many of Breillat’s heroines when, at the end of the film’s rape scene, she cries out: “I’m not ashamed, asshole!”

  That line can be read as defiant. But rewatching the film after reading Ducey’s testimony, it feels closer to contrived—an exquisite abstraction designed to fulfill Breillat’s dream of a world in which women aren’t torn down by the sexual impulses of pitiful men. In reality, there are reasons to feel ambivalent about sex that have nothing to do with internalized misogyny. Some traumas can’t be overcome simply by asserting strength; willing oneself to say they “meant nothing” could also cause them to fester. Breillat’s films themselves indicate that such feelings might be throbbing under the icy surfaces of her characters’ self-control. In this sense she is one of our last true Hitchcockians, perversely fascinated by the fragility of personal autonomy even as she insists on the need to shore it up.

• In The American Conservative, Nic on John Simon:

  And he believed realism would ultimately save film. “There is one quality that more than any other could help revitalize the cinema: believableness,” he wrote as he looked around disapprovingly at the blockbusters in 1990. “Characters in films must re-establish contact with social, economic, and political realities even where film style is non- or anti-realistic.”

  When Simon found a movie that achieved “believableness,” he would gush about it just as much as Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael would go on about their own hobby-horses. One such film, oddly, was Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), which Simon praised because, unlike Allen’s earlier efforts, it was a serious affair which dared to present a world that Simon seemed to believe was true: “There is no justice, no rhyme or reason in the universe, no God.” The review is the best essay ever written on Allen, made all the better by the enmity between director and critic.

• In The New Yorker, Richard Brody on Virginia Tracy, who briefly reviewed movies in 1918 and 1919:

  She expressed frustration with movies that did little but tell a story clearly and efficiently, however skillfully and professionally, and she considered such films to involve unwonted borrowings from theatre, by way of “the economy and unity of the play form.” To wit: “We can’t help scenting a danger in this complete competency of stagecraft, so compact, so firm, so balanced, moving so evenly and yet suspensively toward a climax which has not a loose thread, every incident constructive and yet naturally stressed.” Though she considered Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) a summit of the art, she criticized his direction of True Heart Susie (1919): “We were too conscious of him standing a little between us and the picture and pointing out, a trifle too emphatically, its funniness, its pathos, its simplicity, as though a hand were occasionally laid upon the continuity and we became aware of a voice saying: ‘Just a minute! Hold that till they notice how true this is and how lovely is its homeliness.’” In particular, she reproached his direction of Lillian Gish’s performance: “Everything you insist upon an actress’s doing may be admirable and yet the mere insistence may give her an air of being stage-managed to death.”

Reviews:

• In The Ringer, Adam Nayman reviews Gladiator (2000):

  Getting the script right is the crucial point here. Scott’s poetic eye is real, but so is his dependence on sturdy dramaturgy. When he doesn’t have good material, his obsessive perfectionism curdles into indulgence; he can seem less like an auteur than a sort of spendthrift journeyman. Meanwhile, the idea of Sir Ridley as some sort of uncompromising auteur is, at best, double-edged and increasingly dubious given his own views on the matter. “There isn’t a ‘them and us’ as far as I’m concerned,” Scott told Interview in 2001. “I have enormous respect for the studios—they’re paying me to have a jolly good time making my vision of what we’ve agreed on. All creative minds have to deal with the people who are paying the bills.”

  On one level, Scott is simply being honest about the tension between art and commerce endemic to mainstream moviemaking. On another, he’s admitting that, for all its visionary qualities, his work ultimately and willingly serves the bottom line. The contradiction of an iconoclast who is also a company man is fascinating, especially in light of the themes of rebellion and nonconformity that punctuate Scott’s films, which often focus on conflicts between individuals and institutions.

• reviews Gladiator II (2024):

  Then it’s the fighting, which is, after all, why we bought tickets to see this movie. First-off the gladiators battle a troop of bizarre mansized hairless baboons, all of whom can open their hideously-befanged jaws reeaallly wide. What species these simians are is not disclosed to us, but they struck me as in many ways more promising gladiators than the humans they fought. Really, the movie should have given them armour, shields and swords and had them take on the might of Rome, voiced, perhaps, by Robbie Williams. Gladi-ape-r. At any rate Mescal beats the lead baboon by biting it on its wrist, which seems a bit lame. Then it’s off to the actual Colosseum to fight humans, first in the dusty arena, then on boats, the arena being flooded to provide a suitably watery medium, and sharks bussed-in from Jaws (1975) (“you’re going to need a navis maior” etc.), then in the dusty arena again. One of the fights involves an adversary mounted upon an enormous, blood-thirsty Rhinoceros, genus Rappus Rhinoceros HippusHopaPotamus. Hanno defeats the beast by standing in its way as it charges straight at him, throwing dust in the air to confuse it, and jumping aside so that the rhino smashes into the wall and breaks his nasus, which is a rather Looney Tunes maneuver, frankly. He might as well have painted a false tunnel arch on the Colosseum walls and have the rhino run at that. Wilius Coyotus et Cursor Viae.

• In , reviews Anora (2024):

  There’s a surface reading of this film that the Russian family is merely monstrous. And, sure, they are: Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) treats Ani (Mikey Madison) like a plaything, casually breaking her hopes and dreams like a Ninja Turtle action figure that has reached the end of its usefulness. But the fact remains that Ani herself is a gold-digger. She may have feelings for Ivan, but what she really has feelings for is a way out of her squalor, a way into a better life. She is, in her own way, childish and childlike: when Toros (Karren Karagulian) describes her as an escort, she goes into a screaming rage. She thinks their (hasty, inebriated) marriage is inviolable and she is owed some fantastic sum to dissolve it because that’s how she believes the game is played. But again, this is a child’s understanding of the rules. She doesn’t even understand which league she’s playing in, a fact that Ivan’s mother makes very clear once they meet.

  Again, none of this means we can’t sympathize with Ani. But she can be both sympathetic and fundamentally mistaken. Sympathizing with her does not require ignoring that her own choices in life are what brought her to this moment.

• In Angelus, Joseph Joyce reviews Heretic (2024):

  Hugh Grant, for his part, has spent most of the last 30 years stammering and charming his way into American hearts and increasingly larger houses. Now in the back nine of his career, he has decided to weaponize and thus destroy that goodwill. His last several roles have flipped the rock on the persona to reveal the dirty old man beneath, which such mannerisms usually disguise. After all those weddings he’s finally getting to the funeral, and it’s more fun than he’s had in years.

  Grant is the best part of the film, a charming rake even when the story inevitably plunges into bloody Hell. As it turns out, Reed isn’t interested in conversation as much as an . . . experiment, where he will decide once and for all if his own theory on religion passes muster.

  • Sam Adams:

    In an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week, Grant acted out iconic horror-movie lines as if they were romantic-comedy dialogue, adding a delighted grin to “Hello, Clarice” and cooing “The power of Christ compels you” as if it were a pickup line. But his performance in Heretic suggests there’s less daylight between the genres than one might assume. Like a bumbling rom-com lead, a horror-movie baddie often uses the appearance of vulnerability to get his prey to lower their guard.

• reviews Hundreds of Beavers (2024):

  Filmed in splattery black-and-white, with no dialogue besides grunts, screams, and “ . . . huh??” sounds, peppered with visuals like intertitles and iris lens effects, Hundreds of Beavers is a throwback to silent film era comedies. There’s one moment stolen from a Mack Sennett Keystone Cops short as well as a “riff” on Buster Keaton’s famous falling-house stunt. These are homages, but without the overly respectful tone you often see in homages. Paying respect to a former time is different from inhabiting the former time to such a degree it doesn’t seem “former” at all. The “former” time required skill in pantomime, slapstick, timing . . . tricks of the trade used by performers in the teens and 20s of the twentieth century, tools gained through years in vaudeville, and which were inheritances from commedia dell’arte, a legacy throughline. This is a lost tradition. People don’t “come up” that way anymore.

  But the cast of Hundreds of Beavers seem as though they did come up this way. It’s a reminder that the old bits are the best bits because they have withstood the test of time. Some schtick comes out of a tradition 500, 600 years old. This shit worked across cultures and across millennia, in some cases. Slipping on a banana peel is a classic for a reason (it shows up here, as well, in a funny comment on the initial idea. Things go so poorly for our hero he can’t even do the ol’ slip-on-a-banana-peel correctly).

N.B.:

• Netflix and Lifetime Christmas movies are sexy now. [They should make one about a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books. —Steve]

• A history of movie posters.

• Should you sit until the credits have finished rolling?

• More on historical accuracy in Gladiator II.

• Jim Abrahams died on Tuesday, November 26. R.I.P.

• Marshall Brickman died on Friday, November 29. R.I.P.

In theaters:

[Since every WRB Film Supplement is someone’s first: the movies are listed in approximate order of how good I think they are. Steve’s larks are the ones I recommend you see. —Steve]

Steve’s larks:

[None, alas. Go watch Hundreds of Beavers, which is back in select theaters this week. —Steve]

The rest:

Heretic (dir. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, November 8)

Hugh Grant’s tour of villainy has brought him to weaponizing his charm in the service of Reddit atheism. And the charm helps him trap two Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) in his house so that he can get to the real point of Reddit atheism: haranguing young women about why they’re wrong. (And if that necessitates playing psychological games to demonstrate superior intellect, so much the better.) As a film of ideas it doesn’t really have any—anyone who has spent some time online in the past two decades knows all the moves in a debate like this, and there’s no imagination to add any more. It doesn’t even have the courage of the ideas forced upon it by the concept; by the end Sister Paxton (East) is suggesting that prayer probably doesn’t work, but it’s still nice to think about other people. But the vicious treatment of the Hugh Grant persona is incisive; as Orson Welles said about Woody Allen in words that also apply to Mr. Stuttery Blinky:

Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation.

And Heretic lets the narcissism curdle. To quote Hugh Grant singing Radiohead at one point in the film: “I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo.”

Small Things Like These (dir. Tim Mielants, November 8)

Basically a silent film, both because lower-middle-class Ireland in the ’80s was a place of few words to begin with and because all the characters are types. There’s the everyman in a complicated situation (Cillian Murphy), his wife who’s worried about their position (Eileen Walsh), all the kids they have, the abusive mother superior (Emily Watson), the young woman being mistreated (Zara Devlin), a desperately poor boy who appears on occasion, and so on. The plot incorporates these pieces about as you’d expect. But it’s Murphy’s movie—really, it’s Murphy’s face’s movie; his gift as an actor is an ability to make the operations of thinking visible on his face, and here he plays a man who has to seriously think about who he is and what’s important to him for the first time.

Gladiator II (dir. Ridley Scott, November 22)

A very long and drawn-out commercial for Gladiator, never more than when it puts archival footage of Russell Crowe on screen and so holds Paul Mescal to a standard he cannot meet. That all the self-righteous cant about “the dream of Rome” appears in a film directed by the director of the acid and myth-deflating Napoleon (2023) and written by the writer of that same film indicates that neither Ridley Scott nor David Scarpa has any actual ideas beyond “it’s good when movies are cool and cool things happen in them.” And that’s true—but all the cool is brought by Denzel Washington, who knows that sword-and-sandal is about hamming it up as much as possible, and Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger, who follow his lead as demented co-emperors to Washington’s power behind the throne.

Wicked (dir. Jon M. Chu, November 22)

Ariana Grande tries to redeem two hours and 45 minutes of inexplicable back-lighting, dance numbers with no understanding of what parts of the dancers need to be in frame, and an overwhelming desire to explain every little bit of lore.

[For more on how the animating spirit of this movie fails to understand why The Wizard of Oz (1939) is successful, see Movies across the decades below. —Steve]

Red One (dir. Jake Kasdan, November 15)

The Puritans liked to declare days of fasting and humiliation on December 25 to prove a point. It would be good to have one specifically for everyone involved with this.

Critical notes:

• Molly Haskell:

  There are probably more good movie critics than there have ever been, just as there are more good movies being released than there have ever been. The problem is finding them. The film scene itself has altered irretrievably since the days of print media when a film opened, was reviewed, provoked a discussion, and we were all on the same page, so to speak. Even if there still existed a kind of central clearinghouse of major newspapers and magazines, cinema itself has proliferated beyond the scope of such gatekeepers.

  At one end of the spectrum, there are the superhero films that can fend for themselves, and at the other, the explosion of streaming titles—that endless disgorging of “product” less dependent on the authority of critics than on the buzz of the internet populace. Who can begrudge such a cornucopia, which of course includes many gems? But somewhere in between, you find (if you’re lucky) the lesser-known talents and lower-profile films. It is these films—the esoterica made by directors who are rarely household names, along with the more familiar art-house cinema of veteran auteurs, that desperately need the mediation of critics.

Movies across the decades:

The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), Wicked (dir. Jon M. Chu, November 22)

Read more

Links:

• In the local Examiner, Joe Joyce on the legacy of Pulp Fiction (1994):

  In less capable hands, this reclamation of pulpy crap would be mere bad taste. A food critic once pointed out that there are complex flavors in a Quarter Pounder, which is in fact delicious. But no doubt this critic’s view and that of the average customer at the drive-thru, while identical on the surface, come from different considerations. Simply put, most Pulp Fiction-influenced post-“poptimism” movie lovers just haven’t developed the taste buds to properly savor their slop. The cinephile hero’s journey is a long and arduous process but can be summarized thusly: You like Star Wars (1977), you pretend to dislike Star Wars, you actually dislike Star Wars, and, finally, you like Star Wars again but this time from a place of refinement. The post-Tarantino generation has the low cunning to recognize this is a circle and decide to save the trip. But it’s those years in the proverbial wilderness eating locusts that give you standards. The dark spawn of Tarantino’s egalitarianism is every 40-year-old man with opinions on cartoons and every Twitter reply that wheedles you to “let people enjoy things.”

  [Tarantino has, I think, allowed his taste for trash to rot out his brain. The work he made as a younger man—Jackie Brown (1997) especially, but large parts of Pulp Fiction as well—was far more mature than his more recent work, which attempts to cover up its childishness through endless commentary on pop culture. Pulp Fiction understood, despite its flaws, that pop culture is not real life. You can’t live in it. It’s sad to see Tarantino try. —Steve]

• In the Times, Mark Binelli profiles Guy Maddin:

  Before my trip to Winnipeg, my main exposure to the place had been through Maddin’s own films—in particular, his 2007 feature My Winnipeg, a commission for Canada’s Documentary Channel. For that project, Maddin dutifully exhumed the sort of archival city-life footage you’d find in a proper public-television documentary, but then overlaid it with baroque, deeply unreliable narration and restaged scenes from the history of the city and his own family, some true and some fanciful. Yes, he did grow up in an apartment above a beauty salon run by his mother and aunt, and as a boy would climb into the basement hair chute to peep at the ankles of the largely elderly clientele. No, a flash-freeze of the Red River in 1926 did not trap a group of runaway horses and leave their heads jutting from the ice for months. (“Winter strollers visit the heads frequently, often on romantic rambles,” Maddin claims in his narration, though the image was actually borrowed from the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte’s own heavily fictionalized memoir, Kaputt.) Yes, his father, the general manager of a local hockey team, would lend out young Guy to visiting franchises as a “stick boy.” (In a 1997 documentary, Maddin remembered lathering players’ backs in the showers and gazing in awe at the sullen and monobrowed Soviets. “The guys that I loved so much didn’t wear helmets,” he said. “They wore Brylcreem.”) But alas, no, there was never a daily local TV series called LedgeMan, in which “the same oversensitive man takes something said the wrong way, climbs out on a window ledge and threatens to jump,” only to be coaxed back to safety by his mother. Nor did Maddin’s own mother portray the mother in the nonexistent series.

• In The American Conservative, Nic Rowan on Alain Delon:

  To the intellectually sensitive young man, alienated as much from himself as he is from his surroundings, the attraction of this Delon is often overpowering. (I have known a few to buy raincoats matching Delon’s after first seeing his Melville films.) Here, at last, is a hero who strides through the world completely unfazed by the petty rituals of daily life; he is bound only by his byzantine moral code. These attitudes shade many of Delon’s dramatic performances as well: the sadistic boyfriend in La piscine (1969) or the amoral art dealer in Monsieur Klein (1976). It is unsurprising that his breakout role was as the first screen version of Tom Ripley, in René Clément’s Plein soleil (1960), where he simultaneously plays the charmer and the lone wolf. You could say that Alain Delon was the original “sigma male.”

  [And what’s wrong with that? —Steve]

• In Prospect, David Barnett on folk horror:

  Folk horror also often deals with our relationship to the environment, and that is something more and more people are becoming aware of. “You see the idea of the outsider coming into the community in movies from The Wicker Man (1973) to Midsommar (2019), which is kind of a homage to it,” continues Hurley, “but I think it’s very much to do with the landscape as well.

  “It’s true of all countries, but in Britain in particular there’s so much that has seeped into the landscape—hauntings and superstition, sites of battles or executions—so it’s got this very dark history, and I think folk horror digs that up, it binds that.”

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Anna Shechtman and D. A. Miller review Anora (2024):

  But Ani (Mikey Madison) does believe. She embraces the married state with the fervor of the vulgar characters in Jane Austen who marry sheerly to enter it. She doesn’t appear to be much in love with Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), but there is no mistaking that she is passionately, even desperately attached to the status of married lady. She genuflects at the trite way stations of her induction without the slightest self-consciousness—the ostentatious diamond ring; its invidious display to the girls left behind at the club; the embowered ceremony crowned with a kiss—because grounding all this activity is the stupid-making thrill of getting to say, “I’m Vanya’s wife!” Eventually she accepts the name Anora, which, Igor (Yura Borisov) tells her, means “light.” But, in its derivation from the Latin honos, it also points, beyond the kind of honor that marriage would confer in making an “honest woman” of her, to the strange but unflagging rectitude that the film is patiently getting us to recognize as her aura.

• In our sister publication out West, Annie Berke reviews Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004):

  Still, these types and archetypes live in all of us, move us, in ways we can’t possibly articulate. It’s not all for the ill: Eternal Sunshine is also terribly romantic, more romantic, on rewatching than I even remember. I’m older, so I’ve lived with this movie for almost as long as I lived without it, and I’d forgotten how much I remembered. Maybe it made me just a little bit profoundly, unfixably wrong, as culture is bound to do.

  Putting aside his public spat with critic Mark Kermode and acknowledging the mixed critical reception of his films, Kaufman remains a critic’s filmmaker. He fixates on how taste shapes our movements through the world, how we relate to others (or fail to relate, in any healthy way). And what we like, what we don’t, how our preferences change, and how we persist in love despite ourselves . . . this might be what we’re really looking at when we write an anniversary piece. Directors and studios may cut and recut films, but, ultimately, it’s not the films that change; it’s us, and only if we’re not too mired in the movies that have made us.

• In our sister publication on Lake Erie, Anna Krauthamer reviews May/December (2023):

  Early in the film, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is invited to speak to a high school theater class at the school Joe (Charles Melton) and Gracie’s (Julianne Moore) children attend. When asked by a student why she picks the roles she does, Elizabeth answers that she prioritizes roles with “complexity.” Ever the serious actor, it’s “the moral gray areas” that are interesting to her. But for Elizabeth, the presence of “complexity” is always tied to mimicry, a pleasurable but surface-level way of representing that she mistakes for embodiment. To prepare herself for that task, of ostensibly embodying complexity, Elizabeth attempts to come as close as possible to wearing Gracie’s skin. In one scene, Gracie and Elizabeth stand facing a bathroom mirror, with the camera focused on their adjacent reflections. In a distorted sort of empathetic identification, Elizabeth meticulously imitates Gracie’s makeup routine as if by looking like Gracie she might truly embody her, and newly understand this person previously separate from herself. But in a twist of that logic, Gracie begins applying the makeup to Elizabeth herself, literally taking control of Elizabeth’s means toward mimesis. Why the sudden reversal—why are Elizabeth’s attempts at finding legibility rendered so crudely graceless? 

• reviews The Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech, 1966):

  Earlier in the film, a ledger of the secret police turned into a party guest list. Now a wedding party has become a hunting group. These are the principal tonal shifts in The Party and the Guests, and form the basis of the plot, but throughout are extraneous details that psychologically disorient the audience, that set the uneasy mood: Laughing, a woman calls after her friends for a knife; a desk and chair are carried out of the woods; an authoritarian madly wags his fingers like a toddler; thugs rough up a man by tossing him in the air as though celebrating; sinister men hiding in the trees, their mouths covered with handkerchiefs, emerge and are welcomed as old friends; banqueters play musical chairs; the leader’s son muses lyrically about shooting himself in the head; a wife miraculously changes into her third outfit of the day, a hunting jacket, to join a search party for her husband; her friend questions her while he plays with a rifle, and their other friends stuff themselves with dessert and wine. Watching, it is impossible to settle on any feeling. The stakes are high and low. We doubt even our animal sense of dread. Whether or not this doubt makes us indifferent conformists is the film’s provocation.

Reviews of books:

• In Bookforum, A. S. Hamrah reviews two books about Agnès Varda (A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda, by Carrie Rickey, August; and Agnès Varda: Director’s Inspiration, edited by Matt Severson, 2023):

  Varda herself was harsh on films. The first film she ever saw was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1938. “What is certain is that I hated Snow White,” she said as an adult, explaining that “its valorization of the heroine for cleaning the house of the dwarfs without pay” disgusted her. (“A sophisticated critique for a ten-year-old,” writes Rickey.) Demy loved The Sound of Music (1965); Varda did not. “How could you love a stupid, bullshit film like this, with that stupid babysitter who wishes to marry the father? I mean, is it interesting to see someone wash the pants of eleven children to get a man?” she asked. She thought Ingmar Bergman’s marital dramas were also suspect. As late as 2013 she told an interviewer, “It’s fine that they made Gravity, but I really couldn’t care less.” In A Hundred and One Nights (1995), one of her cinema-valorizing movies, Michel Piccoli, playing a man who is supposed to be the living embodiment of cinema, makes an anti-Bergman statement apropos of nothing, “Down with cries, long live whispers,” demonstrating where Varda’s heart lies.

  [Up there with some of the greatest The Sound of Music hating:

  When it was announced that Ernest Lehman would write a script based on the Broadway hit, Burt Lancaster told him: “Jesus, you must need the money.” When asked to direct, Stanley Donen refused to have anything to do with it. When Lehman sounded out Gene Kelly about directing, he led his questioner to the door of his home and said, “Go find someone else to direct this piece of shit!”

  —Steve]

N.B.:

• Interviews:

  • with Cate Blanchett.

  • with Jesse Eisenberg.

  • with Mark Eydelshteyn.

  • with Harrison Ford.

• The amount of sex in movies is in decline.

• “The dying art of the flop”

• On the Pulp Fiction poster.

• Paul Morrissey died on Monday, October 28. R.I.P.

• Teri Garr died on Tuesday, October 29. R.I.P.

In theaters:

[Since every WRB Film Supplement is someone’s first: the movies are listed in approximate order of how good I think they are. Steve’s larks are the ones I recommend you see. —Steve]

Steve’s larks:

Anora (dir. Sean Baker, October 18)

We learn from various nineteenth-century novels that the worst thing you can do if you’re a woman is make a bad marriage. We also learn from said novels that marriage is basically the only game in town; you have to play it because men have the money.

Anora—she goes by Ani—finds herself in a current version of this predicament. She works in Brighton Beach as a stripper. This will serve as a close-enough equivalent of a governess, especially because she finds herself responsible for Vanya, son of a Russian oligarch, who hires her to be his girlfriend for a week and then marries her in Vegas so he can get a green card. He wants to stay in America because his parents are threatening him with the possibility of having to work instead of sponge off them, which says a lot about what kind of guy he is. And when his parents intervene to get the marriage annulled he starts acting like an eight-year-old, immediately submitting to his parents and taking no responsibility for anything. Still, there aren’t really any consequences for him; women are toys, and their attempts to get the legitimacy of marriage and the money that comes with it are an inconvenience to be dealt with.

If this makes it sound as unrelenting and depressing as Tess of the d’Urbervilles it isn’t, because the middle hour is one hilarity after another. The oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov) and his wife (Darya Ekamasova) tell one of their henchmen (Karren Karagulian) to address the situation, and he sends his own henchmen (Yura Borisov and Vache Tovmasyan), and they make a huge mess of it, tying Ani up while letting Vanya escape, so the top henchmen has to show up and take over. Ani and the henchmen going all over trying to find Vanya—all the while getting into scrapes while Ani yells in beautiful Brooklynese—is a riot. We fall in love with them—but they’re not in charge. And neither is Ani, despite her desperate attempt to hold on to the literal and metaphorical ring Vanya gave her.

[For more on the setting of Anora see Movies across the decades below.]

Juror #2 (dir. Clint Eastwood, November 1)

Clint Eastwood has been polishing his late style for so long that it’s automatic. He knows what he’s interested in, and he knows what he isn’t, and if that means he has to rush through a bunch of shots of home life so be it. The titular juror’s (Nicholas Hoult) home life isn’t the point; the unease he feels and the decisions he makes as he realizes he might be connected to the murder at issue are. And the film looks great there; somehow Eastwood found something new and interesting in the shadows cast by Venetian blinds.

It’s an old man’s film, one with no interest in interrogating why the world is how it is—that’s unchangeable now. The jury system has flaws, but it also has advantages, and in any case it’s what we have. Eastwood cares about how it makes people act, how the potential perversity of its incentives forces people to choose between what it asks of them and what seems to be in their best interest. A younger director might have ended this film five minutes earlier, with an image indicating that a guilty conscience will follow you as long as you live. Clint Eastwood is 94, and he ends his film with a shot indicating that judgment is coming, it’s coming sooner than you think, and you won’t expect it when it comes.

The rest:

Rumours (dir. Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson, Evan Johnson, October 18)

The differences between a G7 summit and a bunch of teenagers getting lost at summer camp are, apparently, minimal. The leaders of the free world, like teens, create their own world. They frequently sneak off to have sex. They like leaving people alone in the woods to freak them out. There are a couple type A personalities who try to keep everyone else on track. They hope that somewhere in all this they’ll discover a solution to all their problems. The giant brain in the woods and the masturbating bog bodies are, though, unique to this film’s bizarre approach, which sometimes leads it to pointlessness but always makes it compelling on those terms.

If the setting should induce the heads of government to act differently, the nebulous crisis they face and their inability to respond to it lead to their regression. They cannot help themselves, since their animal instincts and fears sabotage all their attempts to engage in politics. The world is falling apart and cannot be saved; the Secretary-General of the European Commission (Alicia Vikander) like Brünnhilde burns herself alive (on top of the aforementioned giant brain) before the world ends in fire. 

A Real Pain (dir. Jesse Eisenberg, November 1)

David (Jesse Eisenberg), a creature of the routine he has created between his job, wife, and kids, and Benji (Kieran Culkin), one of those charming people who has no idea what he’s doing, are two Jewish cousins from New York. They embark on one of those road trips familiar from buddy comedies and learn something about themselves, each other, and life more generally. What makes this interesting is the location: Poland, where their grandmother lived before coming to America to escape the Holocaust. They’re there on a guided tour for Jews, which takes them to both concentration camps and the cities that were once centers of Jewish life, and it speaks well of Eisenberg’s skill as a writer and director that the buddy comedy portions coexist with the Holocaust portions without either feeling inappropriate. The question at the center of the movie is the standard “what should I be doing with my life?”, but the cousins’ insistent attempts to answer it have an urgency supplied by the memory of their grandmother: “she escaped a genocide to make our life possible; are we squandering that gift?”

Conclave (dir. Edward Berger, October 25)

A passable Sorkin-style thriller about the election of a pope marred by the usual Sorkin-style problems. Only Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the dean of the College of Cardinals, appears to be an actual human being; all the other leading cardinals exist to be representative of ideological tendencies and give the occasional speech explaining said tendencies. Its commitment to creating scandals for all sides is matched by how ludicrous some of them are—simony? Committed, apparently, by wiring money directly to cardinals’ personal accounts? Really? Near the end, the leading conservative figure, who (speech explaining traditionalist tendencies aside) has shown himself to be a canny operator, has a total meltdown. Another cardinal, who has emerged out of nowhere, responds by giving a speech full of Catholic buzzwords that manages to say very little. The Sorkinesque dream of unity through clever speechifying against the bad speechifiers persists. About the final twist the less said the better, but it certainly explains much of the reaction to the film.

We Live in Time (dir. John Crowley, October 11)

A romantic comedy-drama that follows a couple over several years could do a lot with a non-linear timeline. It could, understanding that a relationship is nothing but constant recommitment, remaking the same decision over and over, line up all those moments, presenting them as all one. The unifying thread is not time but that one decision made over and over, always the same decision; why not, having recognized that most romantic films’ detailing a romance in linear time is just a little bit facile, reveal the real logic and the real organization behind them?

On the other hand, it could also have a non-linear timeline for no reason beyond “non-linear timelines are arty, and if we make our movie arty it will work better as Oscar bait, and so we should do that.” It could then double down on this approach to filmmaking by giving the heroine (Florence Pugh) cancer.

The Apprentice (dir. Ali Abbasi, October 11)

The thesis here is that Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) is an actual human being, and Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), upon coming into contact with him, becomes one of those people in the Inferno whose soul is already in hell while demons puppeteer their bodies on earth. Given this, Cohn is the more interesting figure, but the demands of the Resistance require a focus on Trump. And there’s a reason no one has ever tried to make Mephistopheles more interesting than Faust.

Here (dir. Robert Zemeckis, November 1)

Tom Hanks, Robert Zemeckis, Eric Roth, and Robin Wright, apparently not content with having perpetrated Forrest Gump (1994) against the public, return with more Boomer navel-gazing. But they’re older now and no longer believe they’re the agents of all of history. Thirty years later they’ve gone to the other extreme; the film shows the Boomers receiving a paradise made for them by the sacrifices of their fathers and the political and technological innovations of the past couple hundred years, which they then proceed to squander. They achieve nothing; they build nothing; they preserve nothing; they hand nothing on; all they have left is their memories of failure. And the film tells you this through its text but even more through its inexorable commitment to incompetence. Using AI to create an 18-year-old Tom Hanks is the dream—eternal youth, eternal life—and one completely at odds with good filmmaking. It doesn’t look real because it isn’t.

Critical notes:

• Matt Zoller Seitz:

  I recently asked Gus van Sant, who spent the creative and marketplace capital he’d accumulated as a result of directing Good Will Hunting (1997)—which made $225 million at the box office and was nominated for nine Oscars and won two—on a color remake if Psycho (1960) that wasn’t shot for shot but was pretty close. It bombed at the box office and was considered bizarre and pointless by a lot of critics, even ones who rather enjoyed it. I recently got the chance to ask Van Sant why, of all the things he could’ve made next, he chose that. He called his Psycho (1998) “a cinematic experiment.” I asked him what the point of it was, and he said, “to see what would happen.”

  More directors should be allowed to think that way. Sometimes dream projects result in films that prove to be enormously valuable over the long haul, culturally as well as financially, like maybe half of the Coen Brothers’ output. And once in a while, they hit paydirt immediately, as was the case with the original Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999) which felt so new that a lot of people watching them the first time felt as if they’d been dropped into a country where they didn’t speak the language.

• Abe Beame:

  The movement toward repertory, however, isn’t only because of sudden changes in taste or just a case of people wanting to get out of their homes after being trapped in them. On a grander scale, it’s a Darwinian adaptation to a grim landscape largely created by the cynicism and miscalculations of the major Hollywood studio system. Nearly every decision the studios have made since the turn of the century has inadvertently supported and strengthened the position of repertory cinema as a counterbalance in the industry.

  [I can’t figure out why Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) is called a snuff film in the first paragraph, unless the definition of that phrase changed while I wasn’t looking. —Steve]

Movies across the decades:

Requiem for a Dream (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2000), Anora (dir. Sean Baker, 2024)

Read more

Links:

• Greg Gerke on John Ford:

  All the gruff machismo, the Irish-American bullshit bru-ha-ha (though he said, “I’m a coward”) is there and is well-documented (Jimmy Stewart: “There’s always tension on a Ford set”), but why did this seeming brute and struggling alcoholic feel compelled to not only unsettle human civilization, but redefine it—on his terms? This is unconscionable but not inconceivable. There are no easy answers and none that will fully satisfy anyone. Deleuze: “What counts for Ford is that community develop certain illusions about itself,” something he nodded to directly in life: “We’ve had a lot of people who were supposed to be great heroes, and you know damn well they weren’t. But it’s good for the country to have heroes to look up to. Like Custer—a great hero. Well, he wasn’t. Not that he was a stupid man—but he did a stupid job that day.” Again and again we see the community coming to embrace the “hero,” even in The Quiet Man (1952), where the native Irish adopt the Yank as one of their own. The real answer is Ford’s—history was his real profession (he made four versions of Abe Lincoln over his films), and not surprisingly his pastime was reading history books.

• In The Ringer, Kyle Wilson on Tim Burton:

  In nearly all of these films, the strangest character is the one who has Burton’s sympathies, and indeed the one he’s arguing is the most normal. The regular ones—the suburban neighbors of Scissorhands (1990) who gossip over the phone and at the neighborhood barbecues, the Deetzes of Beetlejuice (1988) who host dinner parties to curry favor with potential business partners—these are the real freaks. That’s a thesis statement that’s always going to ring true to a certain outsider spirit in people, and combined with Burton’s mastery as a visual stylist, it’s no wonder his early films captured the zeitgeist. Jack Skellington and Edward Scissorhands didn’t just become Halloween costume staples because of their signature looks, but because of the melancholic longing Burton managed to instill in them—character traits that made audiences not only find them “cool,” but also worthy of their care. It can be tough to remember that distinction, to clear the decades of Burton branding away to reveal the soul of his initial works. Likewise, it feels like audiences have forgotten the time when a Tim Burton film used to just be plain old fun.

• In The Baffler, John Semley on “elevated horror”:

  By contrast, a great many of the postmodern and elevated horror flicks feel as if they’re knotting in on themselves. They’re hermetic in the negative sense. There is not much to do with Scream (1996), or The Cabin in the Woods (2011), or Get Out (2017), or Midsommar (2019) other than to say, “I get it.” Where many of the classic horror films felt like they were smuggling meanings into them, these new cycles pushed (or “elevated”) any buried subtext to the level of text. 

  Even when these movies are obsessively parsed by fans, such interpretive work almost inevitably points back to basic, clearly stated themes. I am reminded of savvy viewers pointing to a scene in Get Out where Allison Williams’ character carefully separates her multicolored Froot Loops from her glass of white milk, a detail that does little beyond confirming that, yes, this is a film is about racism and the cognitive dissonance of the liberal class. And when such ideas are not painstakingly telegraphed, italicized, and double-underlined, some handwaving about “generational cycles of violence” will typically satisfy lingering questions regarding what a given movie is up to.

• In , on Mishima and Paul Schrader’s response to him in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985):

  Schrader’s film also functions as commentary on Mishima’s final act. Here Schrader is one step ahead of his subject. Mishima seemed not to consider that if he was to make of his life a work of art his final moments would be subject to criticism. What if he his final act was bad art? What if he, in his quest for glory, instead achieved humiliation? What if he, like our ballerina, tumbled off the stage ever so gracelessly? Here he stages the spectacle against the spectacular.

  The simple trick of the film—black and white for reality, color for the literary—admits us onto Mishima’s own terrain. His final act is an act of art. Schrader admits this. Schrader then adopts, as is his right as filmmaker, the standpoint of the divine. He will play the part of fate.

• In The New Yorker, Elena Saavedra Buckley on Todd Solondz:

  In the early two-thousands, American indie films drifted away from hedged yards and time-shares and toward the twee apartments of the mumblecore milieu. Solondz, however, remained planted in the suburban realm he knew best. He also dug in his heels while others in his generation adapted to a bloated, conglomerated industry. Linklater’s romances and epic optimism found studio support; Todd Haynes got Oscar nominations and Netflix money; Sam Mendes, who directed American Beauty (1999), went on to make James Bond films. Solondz, who was briefly considered for larger studio projects, like Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), has a signature Gen X frustration with his industry’s conforming drive, as well as a barbed self-consciousness over real and perceived slights. When he was told that Mendes allegedly found “Happiness” to be condescending to its characters, for example, he mocked American Beauty’s treacly plastic-bag scene in Storytelling (2001): a pretentious director played by Paul Giamatti films a straw wrapper and narrates “how fragile the balance of life is.”

• In the Times, Robert Rubsam on fictional pop songs in movies:

  But only one film that I can think of has been brave enough to own up to the catastrophic implications of a pop hit’s emptiness. Celeste (Natalie Portman), the singer in Brady Corbet’s 2018 Vox Lux, explodes onto the public stage after surviving a school shooting as a teenager. Yet this does not result in deep, meaningful music. Celeste’s songs (as written by Sia) are heavy on flash and light on anything else. “I don’t want people to have to think too hard,” she explains to a lover. “I just want them to feel good.” In acting the role of a national healer, Celeste must stunt herself, a bargain that Corbet presents as essentially Faustian. Her music is the waste product of a culture of violence, a civilization capable only of reproducing tragedy as trashy Europop. Her songs comfort no one, least of all herself. When Celeste returns to her hometown for a climactic concert, the effect is hardly triumphant: All that movement and spectacle does nothing to paper over the void.

• In The Yale Review, Emily LaBarge on Chantal Akerman:

  In the French TV interview, Akerman and Seyrig argue for feminism as a nuanced language—something we might consider to be as much visual and spatial as it is spoken and written. “It is the first time I have seen this subject treated on film, and it’s very rare to see new subjects in cinema—we always see the same ones,” Seyrig says, pointing out how many millions of femmes d’intérieurs exist in real life. “The film was based on my childhood memories,” Akerman explains, “seeing women from behind who were bent over, carrying bags.” It is about what she had observed, what she knew and recognized from life. In a nearby room at Bozar, Jeanne Dielman (1975) plays across multiple monitors: we see Jeanne sitting at her kitchen table, peeling potatoes, checking if the milk is sour, finding herself at a loose end as the day begins to unravel and she remains in her apartment, as if suspended in time and space, until that final, fateful client arrives, and she kills him. Akerman reasserted her position in a radio interview given shortly after Jeanne Dielman’s release: “I’m not a militant. I simply make films that are not colonized, that have not been filtered through the language of men. . . . I think I’m making films that are very close to how I feel and to what I am, and I don’t speak the language of men to express myself. And so, that’s my way of being in the fight.”

• In our sister publication in Hollywood, Sam Weller on the collaboration of Ray Bradbury and John Huston on Moby Dick (1956):

  Huston perceived in his 33-year-old screenwriter a Midwestern naivete. Bradbury had never left the United States. His formal education had ended at high school. He wasn’t a hard drinker or smoker, nor was he a womanizer, unlike the famously libidinous Huston. The seasoned director saw all this and started to play increasingly vicious practical jokes on his earnest screenwriter.

  For example, he told Bradbury that—at the personal request of one of the film’s major investors, Walter Mirisch—he had to insert a love interest into Melville’s story. This was funny, but it was not true. Huston went further, embarrassing Bradbury in front of others by accusing him of not having his heart in the screenplay, just to get a rise out of the young man. He pressured Bradbury to mount a horse and participate in fox hunts. He wanted him to play cards and gamble. Huston drank whiskey at night as he read Bradbury’s daily output of pages and wanted Bradbury to imbibe with him. It was bad enough that Bradbury had to adapt a doorstop book into a two-hour film, but now his hero was preying upon his innocence.

  [Before I work on the WRB I also look in the mirror and say “I . . . am Herman Melville!” —Steve]

N.B.:

• Interviews:

  • with Francis Ford Coppola.

    • Coppola’s list of five books that influenced Megalopolis (2024). [One of them is Elective Affinities; I haven’t read it myself, but based on what Chris says I’m going to call it a WRB classic. —Steve]

  • with Brian De Palma.

  • with Ian McKellen.

  • with Chris Sanders.

• A24 released a kids’ book.

• On David Lynch’s voice.

• On showing parts of Persona (1966) to a seven-year-old. [“No, don’t!” —Steve]

• “I joke with my colleagues [that] when Mubi have a slow social media day, they just post a picture of Maggie Cheung on a motorcycle, and then it’s hearts, hearts, hearts.”

• James Earl Jones died on Monday, September 9. R.I.P.

• Maggie Smith died on Friday, September 27. R.I.P.

In theaters:

[Since every WRB Film Supplement is someone’s first: the movies are listed in approximate order of how good I think they are. Steve’s larks are the ones I recommend you see. —Steve]

Steve’s larks:

Megalopolis (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, September 27)

An epic of untrammeled ambition. This makes it, like any such epic, strange. The reviews will tell you that. But the strangeness is overstated. Some of it is the result of Megalopolis being in development for forty years; forty years of Coppola piling idea after idea, fixation after fixation, into it, and when the time came to make a feature-length movie all manner of ideas left evidence of their presence at one stage or another. But is it strange for a character named Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) to deliver the “to be, or not to be” soliloquy while discussing construction plans in the city of New Rome, a barely-disguised New York City? Is it strange that he should be courted with a recitation of the opening of Sappho 16 in a love scene that owes a lot to the “You Were Meant for Me” scene in Singin’ in the Rain (1952)? Is it strange that his vision for reconstructing New Rome should come to fruition in a tripartite montage reminiscent of the triptych at the end of Gance’s Napoléon (1927), which depicts Napoleon’s victories at the start of the Italian campaign? Sure—and yet anyone who has read The Waste Land has seen this done before and should be able to explain why it is done. Coppola is pulling on everything he knows, pointing not just to itself but to its juxtapositions, having those juxtapositions speak to things not in the source material, hoping to find something new.

[If this is the last modernist movie, it owes a lot to one of the first, Metropolis (1927); its subject matter, its approach to ideas, its politics, and its final vision are inextricable from that film’s. More on this in Movies across the decades below. —Steve]

The Wild Robot (dir. Chris Sanders, September 27)

Pinocchio if Geppetto needed to become a real human being. This means that it still deals with that classic subject of kids’ movies, figuring out how to exist in the world; the difference here is that Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), a robot for domestic service who washes up on an island full of animals, has to figure out how to mother a gosling (Kit Connor) who imprints on her. At the beginning, she frames it in terms of her intended function—completing a task assigned to her—but friendship and love are more mysterious than that. They are so mysterious that they insist another way of life is possible. Maybe the animals don’t have to spend all their time trying to kill each other.

[I basically never cry at movies, especially kids’ movies, but I came close here. Also the rough brushstrokes of the animation look wonderful; see the interview with Sanders above for more on that. —Steve]

The rest:

My Old Ass (dir. Megan Park, September 13)

A sweet little meditation on “’tis better to have loved and lost / than never to have loved at all.” If it involves Elliott (Maisy Stella) doing mushrooms on her 18th birthday and meeting her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza), stranger things have happened. The first thing to be lost is childhood—in a way the model for all these losses, with the attendant dramatic reshaping of any vision of the future—and so it is here. Going to college is one symptom; the family selling the cranberry farm they’ve had for generations is another. And what in life is symptoms is in art the objective correlative. Plaza is very funny as a much older person who acts like she’s above all this; in some sense she is, but no one ever really is.

[As a New Englander I feel obligated to congratulate this film and its cinematographer, Kristen Correll, on the painterly shots of cranberry bogs throughout. (Even if it is set in Canada.) —Steve]

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (dir. Tim Burton, September 6)

Tim Burton is intent on being nothing but self-parody, but at least here he is riffing on Beetlejuice (1986), some of his best work. He doesn’t understand why it’s some of his best work—Beetlejuice is a comedy of remarriage occasionally livened up by Michael Keaton engaging in delicious antics as Beetlejuice; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice attempts to build the whole plane out of antics. They’re good antics, no doubt—Michael Keaton still has it—but without the sense that the movie is actually about something it’s just a string of unconnected comedy sketches. And they are unconnected; Burton managed to fit six or seven subplots into a 104-minute movie, and so most of them don’t really go anywhere or do anything. He could at least have had the decency to let Beetlejuice and Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), now the host of a cheap supernatural TV show, end up together in the spirit of the original’s comedy of remarriage. (The living men in her life are, somehow, much worse than Beetlejuice.) But no. (Winona Ryder agrees!) 

The Critic (dir. Anand Tucker, September 13)

You wonder what an acerbic elderly critic like Jimmy Erskine (Ian McKellen) would have made of the decisions made in shooting this film. Probably nothing—it was the ’30s, and he was a theater critic, and this for a right-wing rag; you assume he did not regard movies as art at all. But if he did, it is hard to imagine he would have liked the random lighting decisions and store-brand Wes Anderson visuals scattered through a film that aspires to noir. The plot, perhaps, would suit him better. After being arrested for gay sex and losing his job because of it, he has an unsuccessful actress (Gemma Arterton) seduce his publisher (Mark Strong) so he can blackmail his way into getting his job back. She agrees to do so in exchange for good reviews. Meanwhile, her ex-lover (Ben Barnes), an artist who happens to be the publisher’s son-in-law, pines for her. Really, you feel for the publisher, the one normal man in a world of art freaks.

The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat, September 20)

This film hates women, and—as these things always go—it’s all the worse because it thinks it’s doing the opposite. Demi Moore is an attractive woman who looks much younger than her 61 years. She is by no means a grotesquerie, but this film makes the aging actress she plays into one. Her youth and life are drained out of her and her time in the world is stolen by a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) that she created with the help of the titular substance. Eventually she becomes—this is the word—a monster. If this reminds you of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or The Picture of Dorian Grey, it should; but those had ideas about their transformations and what they meant. Here, the only idea is that Hollywood treats its aging actresses poorly. This is true, but “Hollywood” didn’t make Demi Moore into a pathetic and monstrous figure. This film did.

Critical notes:

• Will Sloan on changing your mind about a movie:

  I think that being alienated from liberalism means feeling alienated from a lot of the rules and standards and platitudes and hierarchies one might have once accepted unthinkingly. Maybe this is linked to why I’m finding Jerry Lewis funny again: I like his refusal to conform to the rules of Good Storytelling, or to the accepted set-up/punchline rhythm of a well-told joke. Typically he’ll lead with the punchline, then drag it out into infinity, like Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes. I think I like the Three Stooges more than ever for much the same reason.

• In the Times, James B. Stewart and Brooks Barnes on Bob Iger’s palace intrigues at Disney:

  Once in the job, Mr. Iger wondered, as did Mr. Eisner before him: If stripped of his power and multimillion-dollar compensation at Disney, would his allure diminish? For several years, the license plate holder on Mr. Iger’s silver Porsche posed the question, “Is there life after Disney?”

  . . . .

  Few feuds among top executives have ever reached the level of intensity and bitterness of the one between Mr. Iger and his handpicked successor. Mr. Iger has called hiring Mr. Chapek for the top job the worst mistake of his career. Still, the question lingers: How could Mr. Iger have so misjudged Mr. Chapek after working with him for nearly 30 years? “I’ve tried hard to conduct my own post-mortem, just so that we as a company don’t do it again,” Mr. Iger said at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit last year, but declined to disclose any conclusions.

Movies across the decades:

Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927), Megalopolis (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

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Links:

• In the Times, Wesley Morris on being a young critic in 1999:

  Before 1999, “meta” was not a concept I had really grasped. Suddenly, every third movie seemed to be in some way about itself, filmmaking or the movie business. John Malkovich as a personal theme-park ride landed in meta’s hipster strike zone. The Voice introduced its annual film poll in 1999, which Being John Malkovich topped. (It was also near the top of whatever list I made that year.) But The Blair Witch Project was meta’s commercial and cultural gateway.

  The first time I watched it was beside Ebert. The movie ended, and I sat there chilled, shocked that its three filmmaker protagonists were never found. He saw my open mouth and hunted for the appropriate paternal warmth to break the news: “That’s because they’re not real.” Until then, I remember watching a particular kind of tragedy: middle-class white kids lost in America looking for ghosts they couldn’t understand.

• In Fusion, Oliver Traldi on Whit Stillman:

  Defenses of the bourgeoisie, of text over subtext, of disco, detachable collars, and timeworn clichés, seem the key to the director’s own views, a sort of talky traditionalism.

  The response is understandable. Stillman’s characters often express conservative social and aesthetic sentiments that rarely appear in movies. And the expression is often memorable—usually funny and occasionally poetic. But I think the real theme of Stillman’s films is the insufficiency of all this theorizing, particularly the way our theories fall apart when they come up against the realities of the situations in which we find, pursue, and maintain love. It’s not just that our theorizing fails to get us to the truth. Truth is sometimes an inappropriate social goal. On the other hand, polite fictions and prosocial manipulations often elicit the actual truth of our emotions and characters in a way that intellectual inquiry is not strong enough to accomplish.

  [A long time ago Chris, Nic, and I had a frankly rather bizarre sort of discussion about Stillman as a “conservative director” in which we compared him, mostly unfavorably, to Éric Rohmer. I still don’t know what “conservative director” means (I’m not saying “right-wing” on purpose). Leo McCarey? That’s just Catholicism. Rohmer? Also Catholicism. —Steve]

• In UnHerd, Lee Siegel on The Hustler (1960) and division in American life:

  If Rossen had indeed wanted to write a communist or, indeed, a Christian parable, he could have ended his movie right there. In a society whose cardinal acknowledgment is that everyone is broken—lame, or with shattered thumbs—everyone is protected from everyone else. Quod erat demonstrandum.

  But that would be liturgy, not fiction. It would not be honest. Bert (George C. Scott) comes back into Eddie’s (Paul Newman) life and performs his own hustle. He offers to put up the money Eddie needs to make a comeback. Though in conventional Hollywood terms, Bert is a villain, it is hard to deny that he is on the side of the living. “So I got talent,” Eddie says to him at one point. “So what beat me?” Bert replies: “Character . . . Everybody’s got talent.” But what, the movie now asks, is the American definition of “character”?

• In Liberties, Robert Rubsam on Janet Planet (2024) and shooting on location:

  These scenes are pocked with what Roland Barthes called “puncta,” the details which reach out from a photograph and “prick” the viewer with unexpected feeling. Looking over his collection of photographs, Barthes feels himself drawn, “lightning-like,” to surprising details: strapped pumps, a boy’s jagged teeth, the crossed arms of a posing sailor. These details transform the act of looking, imbuing it with an expansive quality that allows him to feel things about these people he has met only as images, as if they were as close as his own beloved mother. His own emotional response attests to the photograph’s indisputable past; because if it had not happened, there would be nothing for him to respond to. Yet the picture itself is also a document of what is already over: of a kind of death. “Every photograph,” he writes, “is a certificate of presence,” “a new being, really: a reality one can no longer touch.” Yet these details touch us, because they are really there. 

• In Notebook, Soham Gadre on Bombay Noir:

  Aar Paar (1955), featuring Dutt himself in the lead role—one of two he played in major noir films, the other being in Pramod Chakravorty’s 12 O’Clock (1958)—repeats many of the tropes of Baazi (1951), like the shadowy boss figure and the centralization of the taxi as the location of many of the film’s main plot points, but this time, it also features a heist, drugs, and several shootout scenes. It was uncommon, even shocking, for Indian films to feature brash acts of violence at the time, and their inclusion was one of the signature ways in which Bombay Noir brought the influence of Hollywood into Indian cinema. But even within Bombay Noir, violence and sexuality was toned down to levels even more restrained than what Hollywood dealt in under the Hays Code. The genre’s narratives also resisted the pessimistic and cynical nature of much foreign noir cinema. Bombay Noir adopted Hollywood’s aesthetics and portrayals of vice, but kept the Bollywood cinema’s romantic optimism.

Reviews:

• In National Review, Ross Douthat reviews Trap (2024):

  Hartnett is very good in those scenes, in which his secret self is fully exposed, and very good in the scenes where he’s playing dadliness straight up. He’s weaker in the scenes where he’s supposed to be a charismatic and convincing liar, talking his way out of trouble: His face becomes hyper-performative, all leaping eyebrows and too-wide grins, not a convincing façade but an obviously suspicious mask. And it’s there that the illusion of dadness is truly broken, because the true dad is nothing if not fundamentally, even embarrassingly sincere.

Reviews of books:

• In The New Republic, Jane Hu reviews Stanley Cavell’s study of the comedy of remarriage (Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, 1981):

  I often find myself most moved by the final chapter on The Awful Truth (1937), not just because the film is the clearest example of a remarriage comedy but also because it is so clearly Cavell’s favorite film of the book. After a breathless recap of its convoluted plot, Cavell lands on the titular phrase “the awful truth,” which Dunne uses to describe the compromising situation Grant finds her in with her music teacher. Cavell’s reading of The Awful Truth—in which the scandals of love are at once mundane and monumental—also strikes me as the best philosophical take on what it means to be, and stay, married. The awful truth of marriage is that we love and marry who we love and marry not because of grand gestures or irrevocable betrayals, but through ongoing acts of faith and daily trials of talk.

  [Chris and I read this book earlier this year and had a bunch of notes about it in which we both lived up to caricature. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Andrew Katzenstein reviews three books about the screwball comedy (Hollywood Screwball Comedy 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals, by Grégoire Halbout, translated by Aliza Krefetz, 2022; Becoming Nick and Nora: The Thin Man and the Films of William Powell and Myrna Loy, by Rob Kozlowski, 2023; and Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges, by Stuart Klawans, 2023):

  But Halbout goes further, constructing an elaborate account of what screwball romances have to say about marriage and society between the Great Depression and World War II. He argues that in early-twentieth-century America, the normalization of divorce (whose “existence and legitimacy are never disputed” in films despite the Code’s restrictions) and the growing emphasis on sexual fulfillment gave female characters the power to set the terms of their marriages and win greater freedom for themselves. Moreover, “the world built by men had been discredited” by the cataclysm of the Depression, and women had to help repair the damage, leading to “a reshuffling of classic male and female roles.” (The PCA had something to do with this shift, too, as Molly Haskell explained in her 1974 study From Reverence to Rape: “The proscriptions of the Production Code that were catastrophic to sexually defined, negligee-wearing glamour goddesses were liberating for active or professional women.”)

N.B.:

• Interviews:

  • with George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

  • with Vince Vaughn.

  • with Winona Ryder.

• An excerpt from Al Pacino’s upcoming memoir (Sonny Boy, October 15).

• On finally seeing Jerry Lewis’ unreleased Holocaust film.

• Girls who wear glasses in 1940s Hollywood.

• Mary Blair’s concept art for Disney.

• The experience of Criterion24/7.

• A recent trailer for Megalopolis (2024) used a bunch of fake quotes from critics.

• Gena Rowlands died on Wednesday, August 14. R.I.P.

  • Richard Brody:

    In Cassavetes’ films, Rowlands was able to give of herself comprehensively, to be herself and to allow the wildest extremes of feeling to overwhelm her on camera. This isn’t solely because of the couple’s personal bond. It’s also because Cassavetes, behind the camera, is giving of himself completely, too, in his responsiveness to the people he’s filming and the situations that they create. She and he seem almost to be meeting at the surface of the image, yielding a sense of shared risk, shared vulnerability, and equality.

  • on Opening Night (1977):

    Opening Night is filled with reflections both literal and figurative. We see Myrtle’s (Rowlands) face in dressing room mirrors, in the younger self she imagines to be haunting her, and in the plot of The Second Woman, with its parallels to Myrtle’s own life. There’s another layer, too. Myrtle, like Rowlands, is an actress who’s crossed over into middle age. She’s aware of what that means in her profession and the doors that have closed behind her as, undoubtedly, Rowlands was as well. Rowlands seems to understand Myrtle better than Myrtle understands herself, but that doesn’t stop her from disappearing into the role.

• Alain Delon died on Sunday, August 18. R.I.P.

  • on his beauty:

    Beauty beckons but it also discourages. His was not an inviting kind of beauty. He was aware of what he looked like, and his awareness was certainly in operation in his performances, but he was not self-conscious about it. He was beyond that. Somehow. It’s mysterious.

  • Alexander Larman:

    If the actor Alain Delon had not existed, it would have been necessary to create him. His death at the age of 88 brings not just a life to a close, but an era in both French cinema and public life that has no corresponding figures in it today, for good or ill. Delon was praised posthumously by none other than President Macron as “more than a star: a French monument.” This is accurate, suggesting that Macron is a surprisingly perceptive judge of cinematic achievement. American cinema had the likes of Henry Fonda and John Wayne, the square-jawed epitome of righteousness and courage; France had Delon, a strikingly good-looking lounge lizard, who was capable of everything from astonishing thespian prowess to equally astonishingly awful off-screen behavior.

  • [More about Delon in Movies across the decades below.]

In theaters:

[Since every WRB Film Supplement is someone’s first: the movies are listed in approximate order of how good I think they are. Steve’s larks are the ones I recommend you see. —Steve]

Steve’s larks:

Sing Sing (dir. Greg Kwedar, July 12)

Describing a movie like this is an exercise in triteness. A group of prisoners at Sing Sing belong to a theater group; it gives them meaning and they learn something from it. Despite appearances, this movie actually has ideas. Divine G (Colman Domingo), imprisoned for a crime committed by someone else, writes plays himself and serves as an unofficial leader of the theater group; it gives him something to do, but he also sees his involvement as a service he takes on for the others. He proposes that another prisoner, Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (played by himself, as are most of the prisoners) join the group after watching him act-but-not-really while intimidating a fellow prisoner in the yard. Or maybe he is acting. As the parole board suggests to Divine G, maybe he’s acting all the time, even now. It’s hard to draw that line—acting shapes a life.

Divine Eye, being new to the group, suggests they escape, mentally, by performing a comedy. It turns out that everyone has some specific idea they want in a play, so they end up with a play containing ancient Egypt, the Old West, pirates, gladiators, the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, and much else besides. This is the description of both an epochal work of high modernism and a story told by a five-year-old. The play itself is more the latter, but it has the spirit of the former; as silly as it is, the theater group puts together a play that gives them all a voice at once, both kaleidoscopic and unified.

Skincare (dir. Austin Peters, August 16)

In Los Angeles no one has a face. They have facialists instead. One of these facialists, Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks), finds that she has a competitor (Luis Gerardo Méndez) in her plaza and within two weeks gets arrested because someone killed him. Getting from here to there is a matter of a bunch of stereotypical Los Angeles people—in addition to the hilariously image-obsessed facialists, the film presents its viewers with a criminal turned life coach (Lewis Pullman) and the co-host of a talk show whose main interest is sexually harassing women (Nathan Fillion)—sitting in their cars and driving around, since it’s Los Angeles. This is also based on real events, since it’s Los Angeles.

This takes place in 2014; the internet is beginning to curdle. Goldman thinks that her competitor Angel is behind a campaign of online harassment, which is both based on nothing and nonetheless able to severely harm her reputation even though everyone can see it’s based on nothing. Goldman also manages to blackmail the talk show host with a video of him offering exposure for sex, where the implicit threat is that it too would make its way to the internet. These people want to live on the internet; faces sag and wrinkle, but pixels are forever.

The rest:

Between the Temples (dir. Nathan Silver, August 23)

Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) is a cantor at his synagogue. He has one immediate problem; he can’t sing. Behind this are additional difficulties. His wife recently died; he is living back at home with his moms (Dolly de Leon, Caroline Aaron) who repeatedly get on his case to find a new girl; the rabbi (Robert Smigel) is making him empty the shofar that he putts golf balls into for practice in between telling Ben to date his daughter (Madeline Weinstein). Is it any wonder that his music teacher from when he was young (Carol Kane) shows up to his bat mitzvah class and looks like a reprieve from all this? Is there a more classic situation than to court a significantly older woman out of some inchoate desire for a change only to really fall in love? (In the Schwartzman-verse Ben Gottlieb is not too far from a possible future for Max Fischer.)

It’s a specific movie. [I kept thinking of A Serious Man (2009), although I will admit that these are the only two movies I have seen that spend a significant portion of their run time in the offices of rabbis. —Steve] And it doesn’t apologize for it; all its jokes about being Jewish show a deep affection for the experience, and if the audience doesn’t understand why it’s funny then so be it. They can laugh at the jokes about upstate New York; that’s interfaith dialogue.

Trap (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, August 2)

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room, and Cooper (Josh Hartnett) does not fret at being trapped in a concert for a teen idol (Saleka Night Shyamalan) with his daughter (Ariel Donoghue). The same amoral genius that makes him an effective serial killer makes watching him work his way out of the dragnet around the concert, bit by bit, outwitting one layer of security after another, thrilling. And Shyamalan, forced by the plot to stay entirely within the concert venue, doesn’t fret either.

Then he gets out and the discipline disappears. Hartnett gets goofy; Saleka demonstrates that she was only cast because she’s M. Night’s nephew; we get a mess of psychological explanation about Cooper’s relationship with his mother. There’s a point to those narrow rooms.

Reagan (dir. Sean McNamara, August 30)

It runs through the highlights and lowlights of the life of Ronald Reagan (Dennis Quaid, who takes a while but eventually does become Reagan) in a basically competent (if congratulatory) manner before letting him ride off into the distance, the Western hero who did his job in this town (the United States of America) before setting off in search of something new. The story is told by an ex-KGB agent (Jon Voight, bad Russian accent) explaining why the Soviet Union fell to a much younger communist; fascinatingly, the communists are doing great man history—the old guy seems to sincerely believe they could have won the Cold War if not for Reagan—while most of Reagan’s explanations of events and their factors come down to material analysis. (Yes, there’s a lot about the human desire for freedom; he also yells at his advisors about the stimulatory effect of tax cuts and connects the Saudis’ geopolitical interests, low oil prices, and the Soviet budget.)

At one point in this movie, a preacher, in the company of Reagan and Pat Boone, prophesizes (this is the word the movie uses) that Reagan will one day become President of the United States. Reagan doesn’t really know what to make of it, but his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) persuades him that he should listen to the prophecy and run. This story was better when it was called Macbeth.

Blink Twice (dir. Zoë Kravitz, August 23)

Here is a question: is it a good idea to get on a plane with a bunch of people you don’t know, travel to the private island of a billionaire tech guy (Channing Tatum) who just got #MeToo’d but says he’s sorry, hand over your phone when you arrive, and then do a bunch of drugs?

If you answered “no,” you are smarter than the two women at the center of this movie (Naomi Ackie, Alia Shawkat). Congratulations.

While on the conceptual level this owes a lot to Get Out (2017) and Don’t Worry Darling (2022), moment by moment it confuses depicting the lives of the rich with having anything interesting to say about them, just like any number of recent movies about the unimaginably wealthy. (This looks better than all of them, though; Kravitz and the cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra, deserve a lot of credit.) Whatever bite this might have had in addressing abusive men is dispelled by the very premise—the movie wants the dark side to be surprising, but it isn’t. It’s obvious. Look at the question at the top of this review again. There’s nowhere to go from there.

It Ends with Us (dir. Justin Baldoni, August 9)

Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) proposes that reading romance novels serves two functions in the lives of women; first, it allows them to escape their lives (since the interpretative strategy they all use is “imagine myself as the heroine”), and second, the narratives provided by the romances allow the women to feel cared for and nurtured, since the men in their lives do not make them feel this way. Give the movie this; it knows what it’s doing. If you want to say something about domestic violence for such an audience, well, the heroine will have to suffer domestic violence. And, since these things require happy endings, there will be another man for the heroine to turn to. So what if he’s a blank? He might be a romantic interest, but he’s really a substitute for the heroine’s ineffective mother. He’s a small child’s understanding of a mother—just there to kiss the boo-boos and make them go away, and hardly a person outside of that function. Even domestic violence can be dissolved into this wish-fulfillment and leave no trace.

Borderlands (dir. Eli Roth, August 9)

Cate Blanchett was marking up Mahler scores in preparation for TÁR (2022) while on set for this. This is like Eliot working at the bank, if the bank were a Mad Max ripoff where every shot looks cheap and fake and every line of dialogue is either tedious exposition or obnoxious “well that just happened”-style attempts at humor. Blanchett’s commitment to this extended even to attempting to walk like a video game character throughout; it did not extend to her voiceover narration.

Critical notes:

• The on antitrust:

  Really, the question is, “Why do executives believe that industry consolidation is good?” And I can provide a few explanations, some of which are charitable and some of which aren’t.

  Big Tech is a colossus. Looking at it from the perspective of traditional entertainment leaders, the massive tech behemoths (Google, Apple and Amazon) are spending billions, likely losing billions (though I can’t prove it), and using their massive platforms to steer customers to their new streaming platforms. In that world, consolidation seems like the only response.

  Consolidation begets consolidation. If all your rivals are buying up competitors, at some point, if you don’t consolidate as well, you’ll get left behind. But this just exacerbates the problems of market power; it never solves them.

  Less charitably, business leaders want market power. I could write a lot more on this—and I may!—but market power is really useful for a business leader. If you have market power, you can pay suppliers less and charge customers more, meaning better profits. That makes your life easy. Don’t get “suppliers” wrong in this sense, either: I’m talking about talent! And below-the-line workers. Those are the folks who “supply” Hollywood with their raw goods.

Movies across the decades:

The Leopard (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1963)

Read more

Links:

• In Liberties, David Thomson on Humphrey Bogart crossing the street:

  Or maybe the director Howard Hawks thought, Well, if this fellow is going to cross the street, we need a little extra to fill the time. Get me a dash of thunder, will you? Like putting mustard on a hotdog. But then perhaps the man in the fedora queried the director: Tell me, why am I crossing this street? And Hawks could have answered, Well, we need enough visual to make room for the thunder—and I like to watch you walk.

  We are attending to The Big Sleep (1946), from the Raymond Chandler novel. This actor is Humphrey Bogart and he is playing Philip Marlowe, the private eye. Marlowe is on a case, so you’d assume that this street scene has to be significant—don’t we know that movies are loaded with all the big things about to happen? Isn’t it the rule on screen that every last thing is vital? The details are clues, and that’s how we are always the private eye. The process of a story is us finding something out, and over fifty years or so that became claustrophobic—as if every damn detail was weighing on us. The visual is so single-minded as a construct. It can’t breathe without insisting on focus and action. No one on a film set ever called out, “Inaction!” And yet there were listless streets in Los Angeles, or anywhere, where not much was happening. Certainly not enough for a movie. Think of it as life.

• In Public Books, Michael Szalay on Miyazaki’s reckoning with Japanese militarism:

  Miyazaki’s tonally complex, incipiently political relation to flight comes to a head in The Wind Rises. The 2013 film focuses on famed engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who designed Imperial Navy fighter planes, the Zero in particular, which Miyazaki has said “represented one of the few things we Japanese could be proud of—they were a truly formidable presence.” He elsewhere added, “Horikoshi was the most gifted man of his time in Japan”; “He wasn’t thinking about weapons—really all he desired was to make exquisite planes.” Such statements generated critical backlash. But although the film is indeed besotted with its gorgeous war machines, Wind is deeply equivocal when seeming to idealize them.

  Wind does not entirely exonerate Jiro, who does briefly think about weapons. “Who are they going to bomb with it?” he asks a fellow engineer about his bomber. The answer: “China. Russia. Britain. The Netherlands. America.” In distress, it seems, Jiro responds, “Japan will blow up.” The engineer reassures, “We’re not arms merchants. We just want to build good aircraft.” Jiro remains silent, and it’s entirely unclear how the film wants us to feel about his moral blinker.

Reviews:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Muriel Zagha reviews Full Moon in Paris (1984):

  Nevertheless, with very few exceptions, religion in Rohmer’s cinema remains submerged and is not made explicit. Though the workings of grace unfold, they are expressed under the guise of happenstance. And so, although Rohmer believes in the moral freedom to make choices, chance encounters abound in his cinema, such as at the end of The Green Ray (1986) (whose heroine reads as omens the playing cards she sometimes finds in the street) or A Tale of Winter (1992)—where a long-lost love miraculously reappears during an ordinary bus ride. Much in Full Moon in Paris appears to hinge on chance encounters, until the last scene which shows us Louise’s (Pascale Ogier) crushing downfall when she least expects it, as she walks into the trap she has set for herself. The ending provides the antidote to her delusion. It also reveals another story that has been unfolding throughout unbeknownst to Louise—and to us—though the signs were there from the beginning.

  At once a charming slice of life and an astringent crucible of morality, Full Moon in Paris holds within itself the best of Rohmer’s cinema for which another epigraph could be Schiller’s line: “Live with your century, but do not be its creature; serve your contemporaries, but give them what they need, not what they praise.”

  [The timelessness of Rohmer’s work makes it very funny whenever he sends his characters to a club, which invariably plays the worst and most era-bound pop music imaginable. —Steve]

• In Current, Dave Kehr reviews Risky Business (1983):

  Here was the repository of everything repressed in our homogeneous world: not just the cultural monuments of museums, bookstores, and first-run movie theaters, but also people of different races, classes, and ethnicities, varieties of human experience not available to the sheltered, mostly white youth of the outer ring. It was a world that could at first only be accessed with parental supervision, which automatically made it feel dangerous and very alluring. A rite of passage for every suburban teen was the first trip to the city without Mom and Dad. As intimidating as downtown could be, it also offered a glimpse of autonomy and freedom. It was, in short, a sneak preview of the pleasures of being a grown-up.

  Risky Business is structured around this metaphor, as was John Hughes’ later, and much more benign, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). But where Hughes offers a fantasy of total domination, with the city surrendering to Ferris’ (Matthew Broderick) charm and self-assurance, Brickman is characteristically much more elliptical and ambivalent. By the end of the film, Joel (Tom Cruise) will have found his place in the city, but it is a precarious, morally dubious one that requires him to sacrifice as much as he has gained.

  [As Kehr notes, this made Tom Cruise a star and not Top Gun (1986). I would say that there is a lesson here for the studios as they attempt to make anyone under the age of 40 a Movie Star, but I’m beginning to be convinced that much of the blame is also on audiences. What’s the point, if you’re running a studio, of making mid-budget movies for adults that audiences say they want if the box office receipts indicate differently? —Steve]

• In The Baffler, Moeko Fujii reviews Janet Planet (2024):

  On film, daughters often inherit ways of looking from their mothers and thus prepare themselves to be looked at. A classic scene is a daughter trying on lipstick at her mother’s vanity table mirror. But in Janet Planet, the question of orienting oneself around a partner, or around men, is not about surfaces. “I know I’m not that beautiful,” Janet (Julianne Nicholson) tells Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) one night as they lie awake. “But I’ve always had this knowledge that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried. And I think maybe it’s ruined my life.” “Can you stop?” Lacy asks, and clarifies: “Stop trying.” To stop trying would mean to exist in a world simply of Lacy and her mother, and while that is a full life for Lacy, it is not enough for Janet. The desires of mother and daughter diverge—a necessary asymmetry, difficult in any kind of love.

• In our sister publication in the City of Angels, Torsa Ghosal reviews Monkey Man (2024):

  But Monkey Man’s extended engagement with the Rāmāyaṇa is distinctive—if perhaps not in the way Patel intends. While at first glance the presence of Hanuman-related iconography in a revenge drama featuring a South Asian lead could come across as a typical Hollywood attempt to capture a broader audience by expanding on-screen cultural representation, Patel is undertaking a more complicated task. No artwork drawing upon the Rāmāyaṇa can ignore the epic’s functions in the political sphere, and Patel’s film doesn’t pretend to be agnostic. It’s clear that Monkey Man is trying to free Hindu iconography from the death grip of the divisive Hindutva regime. But the reclamation project turns out to be a fraught one since the film recruits various myths and symbols without detaching them from the hypermasculine angst that characterizes their usage in Hindutva propaganda. Monkey Man simply locates the fictional right-wing Saffron leaders as the morally corrupt Others, criminals culpable for the death of the protagonist’s mother and, therefore, deserving targets of his rage and retribution campaign. In this way, the film actually extends the logic of reactionary violence it attempts to refute.

• Two in our sister publication across the pond: first, Michael Wood reviews The Beast (2024):

  Beneath all these antics is the sketch of a sentimental anti-bot story, a tale about being human, a defense of feeling and individuality at all costs. But the sense finally created by the film, by our living for a couple of hours with Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay), is rather different, closer to speculative fiction than science fiction. The preoccupation with what may happen in the midst of what does happen seems very relevant, and if this interest is often an obstacle or deviance in ordinary life, it is also the full-time job of many writers and filmmakers. In the movie we see a lot of what James called the jungle of human life, the paths in the vegetation, the escape routes taken or missed, and we face or fail to face the knowledge that some people have no life except in this unliveable world.

Reviews of books:

• Second, David Trotter reviews a book about war on film (The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film, by David Thomson, 2023):

  “In two world wars,” he observes, “the American homeland was calm; its industry thrived; its stories swelled in grandeur. But it longs to be the leader and a star in war studies. So America has had few rivals in the making of exciting war movies, or in the ingenuity and expressiveness of its military expenditure.” Thomson has always been as interested in the way films are made as he is in their appearance on the screen, and he gets down to business with some intriguing thoughts about the ways in which the process and scheduling of a film might seem to resemble the “order of battle.” Both require advance planning, a firm control of logistics, and, above all, an absolute faith in the ability of the various members of the “unit”—task force, or cast and crew—to work together to get the job done.

  [All films are about the process of filmmaking, if you think about it. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews a book about the sci-fi movies of 1982 (The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, by Chris Nashawaty, July) [The Upcoming book in WRB—July 27, 2024.]:

  Such is Nashawaty’s command of superlatives that he merits a sci-fi yarn of his own. The Optimizer, perhaps. Or The Hyphenator. Thus, Star Wars (1977) is lauded as “a true once-in-a-generation pop-culture juggernaut,” while the triumph of The Wrath of Khan (1982) was to turn “a cash-grab sequel into a franchise-resuscitating classic.” Far from scorning this excitable tic, I find it both judicious and contagious; the book’s parsing of Halloween (1978) as “a babysitter-in-peril slashterpiece” is hard to quibble with, and I wonder what other paragons of the medium would profit from so crisp a paraphrase. Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972)? A crimson-tinged, don’t-hold-back Scandi cancerthon. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)? A chat-free high-stakes teen roast. Once you slip into the habit, you can’t stop.

N.B.:

• Interviews: 

  • with Nicolas Cage.

  • with Mia Goth.

  • with Viggo Mortensen. [I’m happy he’s keeping the faith that movies should be released in movie theaters. —Steve]

  • with Glen Powell. [I’m happy he’s keeping the faith that one really good romantic comedy could revive the genre. I’m less optimistic. Anyone But You (2023) (which, to be fair, isn’t better than “fine”) was lucky to be released in the doldrums of late December so it could compete against nothing in January and February. —Steve]

  • with a storm chaser about Twisters (2024).

• Keanu Reeves and China Miéville wrote a novel.

  • This isn’t the first time an actor has done so.

• An oral history of the Garden State (2004) soundtrack.

• Robert Towne died on Monday, July 1. R.I.P.

• Jon Landau died on Friday, July 5. R.I.P.

• Shelley Duvall died on Thursday, July 11. R.I.P.

  • on her approach to acting:

    Shelley Duvall was brilliant in that she was able to be as unself-conscious, as raw, as HERSELF, when the camera was rolling as she was in her real life. There was no difference for her. It’s like she roller-skated into the frame from offscreen and there was no boundary between the two sides. Something happens to people—even very very good actors—when they hear “action”. You go from being a real person to an actor playing a scene. There’s a little interior “click” that happens. Shelley Duvall didn’t experience that click.

  • on her performance in 3 Women (1977):

    Here’s one way to read Duvall’s story: She was plucked from obscurity and molded into a star by a director who saw a quality in her nobody else did, not even herself. But that’s not how Altman saw it. Altman loved actors but he frequently spoke of disliking acting, by which he meant performances that felt like performances rather than human behavior observed by his restless camera. “She was Grandma Moses,” Altman says of Duvall on a commentary track he recorded for 3 Women in 2003. “She was such an untrained, truthful person.” She was not, in other words, clay to be shaped. She was just there, waiting to be found.

• Shannen Doherty died on Saturday, July 13. R.I.P.

In theaters:

[Since every WRB Film Supplement is someone’s first: the movies are listed in approximate order of how good I think they are. Steve’s larks are the ones I recommend you see. —Steve]

Steve’s larks:

Dìdi (dir. Sean Wang, July 26)

It is shockingly unpleasant to be reminded what it is like to be a 13-year-old boy. One moment here stands out for its insight into their self-centered perversity; Chris (Izaac Wang) is in the first stages of realizing that his mother (Joan Chen) is a real person, with the same desires and fears and hopes as anyone else. He uses this knowledge to scream at her exactly what he has realized will hurt her most. And yes, her life hasn’t gone how she would like—her husband works in another country and is basically never home, her dream of being a painter has never gone anywhere—but what does a 13-year-old know about disappointment?

While Chris comes around to appreciating his mother he lives the life of a 13-year-old in 2008—Myspace is still around, young people actually used Facebook, and everyone is constantly in chatrooms. Chris isn’t the kind of kid who can escape into a world he finds online, and his attempt to parlay some YouTube videos he made into filming older kids’ skateboarding tricks is a disaster from the start. The Internet isn’t an alternate life; it’s just where his life takes place when he isn’t physically with his friends. There’s a sweetness to it that in 2024 reads as naïve; but it was a different time, and the instant communication the Internet makes possible feels almost magic here. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to learn how to kiss from YouTube videos was very heaven.

Fly Me to the Moon (dir. Greg Berlanti, July 12)

[This movie does not quite meet my standard of quality for Steve’s larks—it should be at the top of The rest—but I have bumped it up to show my support for the romantic comedy. The last one before this to get a wide theatrical release came out in December. If we don’t go see them they’ll stop making them. Don’t let them take the romcom away from us. —Steve]

In a better world than this one Scarlett Johansson would have revived the screwball heroine a while back—she was born for it—instead of getting around to being the lead in a romantic comedy two decades into her acting career as an adult.

[For more on screwball commentary on what America is and needs, see Movies across the decades below.]

The rest:

The Bikeriders (dir. Jeff Nichols, June 21)

Every review mentions how desperate this is to be Goodfellas (1990), and every review is right to do so. And the movie wants the audience to know this too—why else have in the first minute a freeze-frame in the middle of violence, while a woman who sounds a bit like Lorraine Bracco as Karen Hill explains the situation? This strategy has its advantages; Goodfellas is a great movie with many things worth stealing. It also has its disadvantages; Goodfellas is a great movie, and so anything stolen from it is likely to end up as an inferior copy.

The Bikeriders never does answer the question “why should I be watching this instead of Goodfellas?” but it’s still fun. Austin Butler is tasked with looking hot and confused and is very capable of that; he is a man torn between the dictates of domesticity his girlfriend (Jodie Comer) would like him to follow and the sense of purpose he only feels on a bike and with the motorcycle club under Johnny’s (Tom Hardy) leadership. This is all very innocent at the start—Johnny’s main motivation to start the club was seeing The Wild One (1953) on TV and thinking Marlon Brando looked cool—but, as the ’60s go on and Vietnam comes home, they all discover that while the club is freedom, it’s also a trap. (This attempt at linking its plot with the state of America is, to be fair to this movie, something Goodfellas does not do.) Eventually there’s a lot of violence; things get sorted out; life goes on, but it’s never really the same. Just like Goodfellas.

Thelma (dir. Josh Margolin, June 21)

Rarely is a film so overt about using a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. The spoonful of sugar is the plot; 93-year-old Thelma (June Squibb) goes on a quest to get back $10,000 scammers stole from her, in the process doing—by the standards of a 93-year-old woman—daring and exciting stunts, many of which involve a motorized scooter. She is assisted in this by her elderly friend Ben (Richard Roundtree (R.I.P.), and the five decades between Shaft (1971) and this have not made him any less cool), and the two of them get to act like Tom Cruise and the person feeding him instructions in his earpiece—they have Wi-Fi-connected hearing aids that do the job.

The medicine is everything that happens in the background while Thelma and Ben are off hunting down the scammers. Her daughter (Parker Posey, playing what could be a middle-aged version of some of her more iconic ’90s roles) is desperately trying to find her while proposing to the rest of the family that the sudden disappearance of a 93-year-old who just fell victim to a scam means she shouldn’t be living alone anymore. Thelma’s grandson (Fred Hechinger) doesn’t have much going for him in life and has thrown himself into caring for her; her disappearance on his watch makes him feel like he’s failed at absolutely everything. The assisted living facility wants to know where Ben is. Yes, it all amounts to a plea for intergenerational understanding; but most of those don’t have the panache to include an old woman crashing a motorized scooter at high speed.

Twisters (dir. Lee Isaac Chung, July 19)

The charm of Twister (1996) is its complete lack of restraint. It is a movie that dares to diegetically play “Child in Time,” the William Tell Overture, and “Oklahoma” at the same time as the chasers ride off in pursuit of a tornado. It would be wrong to call Twister a good movie, and yet it works, because whenever it finds something good (Philip Seymour Hoffman, the humiliation of Jami Gertz as intruder in this comedy of remarriage) it shamelessly returns to it over and over again.

Twisters, which is under the impression that what America missed about big studio movies from the ’90s was their stolid competence, does not do that. Glen Powell is fine. Daisy Edgar-Jones is fine. Their chemistry is fine. Everything is fine. This movie made launching fireworks into a tornado boring because, compared to Twister, it is boring. As if to rub it into viewers’ faces that it misunderstood the assignment, there is no kiss at the end. Apparently Steven Spielberg, executive producer, is responsible for this; Edgar-Jones says “it stops the film feeling too clichéd.” Pass over whether summer blockbusters should be adverse to clichés and look at what piling up the clichés can do; it gave the world Casablanca (1942). Steven Spielberg, who should know better, piled up the clichés and gave the world Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Is it more clichéd than Twisters? Yes. It’s also better.

Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1 (dir. Kevin Costner, June 28)

Kevin Costner has the eye of a director of motion pictures and the mind of a man who has spent the last several years working on a television miniseries. This might be the first three hour-long installments of something; in the context of a movie, it feels like the first half hour of six different Westerns, passable on their own, prevented from going anywhere by the format, and so a slog. (It doesn’t help that the bravura of an Apache raid occurs very early on.) It also quickly becomes clear why Costner needs twelve hours for this project; he is responding to past criticism of the Western that it glosses over many people who made the West in order to focus on white men, and his response is to include every single person, place, and thing in the West he can think of. How these six first half hours will come together in later chapters is no secret—all of these people are going to Horizon, which is both the name of a town and a place you can never get to, because as you approach it it keeps moving away from you! Get it? Get it? Ain’t that America?

Kill (dir. Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, July 4)

America needs a better class of action movie watchers—at least, it needs them to stop comparing any movie in which one guy kills a lot of other guys to John Wick, as if that were the only important feature of that franchise. Yes, the hero (Lakshya) goes on a rampage killing those responsible for the death of his girl (Tanya Maniktala), and the way he fights up and down a train for two hours comes up with clever ways to use the setting (even if it smacks of Bullet Train (2022), which isn’t good company). But Bhat loves not his artistry but his brutality. There is no dancing here.

Touch (dir. Baltasar Kormákur, July 12)

It’s fine for a tearjerker like this to be a bit manipulative—if you’re telling a story about an old man, Kristófer, (Egill Ólafsson; Palmi Kormakur as a young man) trying to find his first love, Miko, (Yoko Narahashi; Kōki as a young woman) decades after her father (Masahiro Motoki) took her halfway around the world to end their relationship, you’ve committed to that approach. But the real manipulation here is the false nobility applied to the Boomer zeitgeist; while on this quest Kristófer keeps ignoring phone calls from his daughter. And its love for the Boomer self-conception is nauseating. This is not a film content to use “Give Peace a Chance” diegetically; it then needs Miko to say that Kristófer reminds her of John Lennon.

Kinds of Kindness (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, June 21)

In his review of A Clockwork Orange (1971) Roger Ebert wrote “Alex (Malcolm McDowell) has been made into a sadistic rapist not by society, not by his parents, not by the police state, not by centralization, and not by creeping fascism—but by the producer, director, and writer of this film, Stanley Kubrick.” In a similar way, the characters in this film have been made into sexually perverse abusive tyrants and sexually perverse hopeless neurotics not by anything in their souls and not by any societal phenomena but by the co-producer, director, and co-writer of this film, Yorgos Lanthimos.

Critical notes:

• W. David Marx on Rocky IV (1985) and cultural relics:

  Debates about the causes of twenty-first century cultural stasis always begin by blaming the economy and technology: monopolistic control of the media industry, the hollowing out of the middle class, rising health care costs, algorithmic feeds, the proliferation of media-making tools, etc. These are certainly legitimate factors and set the horizon for our social activity. Yet Rocky IV makes it clear that stasis also must involve how artists think about production. In 1985, Stallone made most choices as director that broke with pre-Eighties filmmaking techniques, and unfortunately for him, very few of these radical decisions became conventional in the future. He swung, and he missed. Compare that with original Rocky (1976) director John G. Avildsen who chose to do his film as a grainy, naturalistic underdog story. Both are products of their times, but the original is canonical, while part four is famous as the world’s most dated film.

  But Stallone was doing what a lot of twentieth century artists felt was their core responsibility: pursuing bold aesthetics. He operated from a vague avant-garde mindset of wanting to make something that felt au courant. A major part of cultural stasis, then, may stem from most artists refusing to embrace contemporary aesthetic choices.

Movies across the decades:

The Lady Eve (dir. Preston Sturges, 1941), Fly Me to the Moon (dir. Greg Berlanti, 2024)

Read more

Links:

• In The Ringer, Adam Nayman on the ambiguities of Richard Linklater:

  There are other examples where Linklater slyly has it both ways, including arguably his most beloved titles. Dazed and Confused (1993) vibrates with nostalgia for the halcyon, hard-rocking days of the early ’70s, but it’s also shadowed by sensations of anxiety around the vicious hazing rituals enacted on incoming freshmen by a campus-ruling class of knuckleheaded seniors (still Ben Affleck’s single best performance). And, depending on how you look at it, the hyper-articulate, semi-improvised, wall-to-wall conversations between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy that define the Before films—a trilogy set at nine-year intervals in the lives of its tempestuous lovers—either speak to the eloquence of its intellectually curious characters or confirm their inability, across the decades, to truly communicate. (“I feel like you’re breathing helium and I’m breathing oxygen.”)

  The saying goes that it’s darkest before the dawn, and, compared to its two predecessors, Before Midnight (2013) is a caustic, claustrophobic viewing experience; where the courtship rituals of Sunrise (1995) and Sunset (2004) evoked the style of Éric Rohmer, the finale’s knock-down, drag-out arguments contain bellowing echoes of John Cassavetes. The film’s emotional violence is so bruisingly acute, in fact, that its provisionally happy ending feels imposed—a fact of which Linklater is keenly aware. For a movie set in Greece to close with a reference to a deus ex machina—with Hawke’s despondent, unfaithful Jesse throwing a Hail Mary in the form of a thought experiment about time travel and a letter from the future—indicates a filmmaker who understands the relationship (and difference) between fantasy and reality.

• Three touching on Chinatown (1974):

  • In The Guardian, on its screenplay:

    The scenes between Cross (John Huston) and Jake (Jack Nicholson) alone are a dazzling battle of wills, because all of the confidence and swagger that Nicholson projects so naturally withers in Huston’s presence. During their meetings, Cross keeps mispronouncing Jake’s last name—he calls him “Mr. Gitts”—which is probably a deliberate strategy to make Jake seem unimportant, but could, in fact, reflect a genuine unimportance to him. “You’ve got a nasty reputation, Mr. Gitts,” says Cross. “I like that.” But their similar reputations do not make them the same: Jake is a good enough detective to discover every last one of Cross’ dark secrets, but there’s nothing he can do about it. That’s how real power works.

  • In The Dispatch, Hannah Long on its idea of the divine:

    And Cross certainly sees himself as a creator. In his final monologue, he goes off on a tangent about tidal pools. His partner, Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), had been “fascinated” with them. “You know what he used to say?” Cross reminisces. “‘That’s where life begins.’” The irony is that Cross drowned Mulwray in one such pool—an artificial one. On the surface, the tirade is a speech about water rights, but the deeper meaning goes back to the second line of the Bible: “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Even the font of life is a place of death. 

    The small-minded Gittes, of course, doesn’t follow, and can only assume there’s a fiscal motive.

  • In The Lamp, Stanley Fish on film noir in general:

    Fatalistic is too weak a word to describe the world noir characters inhabit. Fatalism tells us that what must be will be; there is nothing we can do to evade or alter our fate. Noirism tells not only that we can’t evade it, but that its shape will be unpredictable; life’s purpose is to trick us into thinking that we understand even a small part of it and then to take an unexpected turn, dashing all our hopes; you thought you knew what you were doing but you didn’t. Rose Balestrero (Vera Miles), the wife of the world-tossed hero (Henry Fonda) of Alfred Hitchcock’s docudrama The Wrong Man (1956), puts it perfectly: “Every time we get up, something knocks us right down again.” That something is not a visible and opposable entity like a big corporation or a political conspiracy or a corrupt municipality (although there is some of that in This Gun For Hire (1942), Hell or High Water (2016), and Chinatown); rather it is a universe indifferent to the hopes and ambitions of its inhabitants who have dreams, some of them modest, some of them venal, that will always be undone by circumstances they could not predict and cannot control. 

  [Chinatown is not really about a visible entity that can be opposed, and its universe is hardly indifferent; it is a film about spiritual wickedness in high places, whose visible manifestations barely hint at the malevolence beneath. I think Long is incorrect to describe the world of Chinatown as pagan; a pagan version of this story exists, and it is called Oedipus Rex, one complete with incest bringing a curse to the land and the detective investigating the situation having too high an opinion of himself and discovering something he didn’t want to know. Fate may destroy Oedipus, but it makes no sense to describe it as evil, or actively intending misery. Noah Cross, though, has a mind, and a soul, and he knows what he is doing and what he has chosen. Even Long’s phrase “the font of life is a place of death” echoes nothing so much as one of Milton’s descriptions of Hell:

  A Universe of death, which God by curse

  Created evil, for evil only good,

  Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,

  Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,

  Abominable, inutterable, and worse

  Then Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d,

  Gorgons and Hydra’s, and Chimera’s dire.

  (Note that Milton specifies that the place is worse than anything the pagans have imagined.) And Fish, I am sure, appreciates the resonances Cross declaring that he wants to control “the future, Mr. Gitts! The future!” has with Milton’s Satan expressing similar intentions near the start of Paradise Lost:

  Since through experience of this great event

  In Arms not worse, in foresight much advanc’t,

  We may with more successful hope resolve

  To wage by force or guile eternal Warr

  Irreconcileable, to our grand Foe,

  Who now triumphs, and in th’ excess of joy

  Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav’n.

  “In foresight much advanc’t”—the past and present are what they are, but the future belongs to those who are, as Cross says, “capable of anything,” capable of first conceiving of and then carrying out “eternal Warr” against God. —Steve]

• interviews Carrie Courogen about her new biography of Elaine May (Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, June):

  At the end of the day, it’s gonna be Tootsie (1982), which, coincidentally, is also a movie I became obsessed with in my early teens. I remember I had the Syd Fields screenwriting book and read all the fuss he made about how it’s maybe the most perfectly constructed comedy of all time, and was like “yes, yes, yes!” But, again, in spite of how it was probably one of my top ten favorite films for more than half my life, I didn’t know she had a hand in it until like the past five years. Even if it’s maybe not her most signature The Elaine May Work, I think it might be her best. When Mike Nichols called it her greatest save, he wasn’t being hyperbolic. I get so giddy when I talk about this, it’s so geeky, but my favorite part of this entire journey was learning more about that and, especially, finally getting to read her handwritten notes and amendments to the script. I was practically peeing my pants having it in front of me, I was so over the moon excited. And it didn’t disappoint—she really did totally reshape it, and added in most of the best jokes, and she had such astonishingly precise notes and edits. It has touches of her signature voice that when I watch it now, maybe because I’m just so intensely familiar with her, that I can watch and say—even without re-consulting the script—“Oh, that’s Elaine” after a line or two, but it’s more astonishing to me how removed she is from it, too. That movie is rightfully held up as one of the greatest comedies of all time, and even if it isn’t screaming “THIS IS AN ELAINE MAY SCRIPT,” that’s because of her. 

• In Decider, Glenn Kenny on Kevin Costner’s history with the Western:

  The box-office failure of Wyatt Earp (1994) did not deter Costner from continuing to think big.  The archetypal Western hero, that is, let’s put it, the Lone Man Who Only Wants To Enter His Home Justified but either 1) can’t find a home or 2) can’t get to his home for all the bad guys in his way, was revived in his filmography twice shortly after Wyatt Earp, albeit with genre variations. First came 1995’s Waterworld, an idiosyncratic futuristic after-the-flood extravaganza that was kind of laughed out of theaters, at least in part for an opening scene showing how Costner’s character recycles his urine into drinking water. It’s actually a pretty good movie in its gonzo way.  Then came 1997’s The Postman, a metaphor-heavy post-apocalypse tale (set in 2013—looks like our reality dodged a bullet!) in which Costner’s title character seeks to restore order to a devastated and lawless U.S. by, you know, delivering . . . not just the mail but a call to arms to a downhearted populace. Costner directed this one and had final cut, yet declined to cut the picture’s nearly three hour running time. His performance and his directorial depictions of his character were, many critics complained, almost insane in grandiose self-regard. 

Reviews:

• In the Verso blog, Jake Romm reviews The Zone of Interest (2023):

  This is the apotheosis of the photographic way of seeing: complete alienation. Your own vision subordinated to the eye of the camera, everything form within the frame. To photograph is to freeze time—that is, to photograph is to make dead. It is, in a sense, a corollary to instrumental reason, the reduction of thought to the calculation of inputs and ends, the very reasoning which Adorno and Horkheimer saw operative in the camps, the heart of the dialectic of enlightenment. Why then the injunction against aestheticization? It does the victims a disservice, a dishonor even, to see others pantomime their suffering, which is horrible beyond empathy. But the very form of the cinema-eye, only slightly different from the photo-eye, is itself a recapitulation of this alienation. We cannot feel our way into the suffering, even if we see it, but we can feel our way into this lack of feeling.

Reviews of books:

• In our sister publication on Lake Erie, Robert Baskin reviews two compilations of material from Robert Bresson (Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943–1983, edited by  Mylène Bresson, translated by Anna Moschovakis, 2023; Notes on the Cinematograph, translated by Jonathan Griffin, 2016):

  At one point in Notes on the Cinematograph, Bresson asks, “is it for singing always the same song that the nightingale is so admired?” The first time I read the book, I understood Bresson as a sort of nightingale, forever dealing with the same themes in films with the same style. The filmography itself tells a different story. While Bresson worked towards his principles, he was only human, and his career does follow a familiar artistic path of experimentation, refraction, technical development, and the accompanying variation in quality. Whatever the flaws in Bresson on Bresson as an aesthetic manifesto à la Notes, it is a wonderful testament to Bresson as a working artist. In Notes, he can seem unapproachable, uncompromising in his fidelity to his maxims and principles. In the interviews collected in Bresson on Bresson, however, you get a sense of him thinking and questioning himself. Earlier I quoted some of his thoughts on sound in film from Notes. An interviewer in 1968 pressed Bresson on these ideas, pointing out the higher incidence of music at the beginning of his career. The filmmaker responds, “I made mistakes with the use of music in my early films.” I realized the book’s true value when I began thinking about it more as a reference, reading the relevant interviews after watching his films for this piece. 

• In The Yale Review, Annie Berke reviews a book about Siskel and Ebert (Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever, by Matt Singer, 2023):

  As television personalities, Siskel and Ebert’s lexicon could never be as cool and literary as prose designed to be read, but, as Singer explains, these men saw their jobs a little differently from hipper critics like Andrew Sarris and The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. For Siskel, to be a film critic was to be a journalist reporting on a fire—“only the fire,” Siskel explained, “is my reaction to the movie. And I jump off into that approach.” For Ebert, a critic was a teacher. “What we’re trying to do,” he would say, “is share everything we found out about the movies with people who are interested in that.” They provided an accessible, surprisingly rigorous film education to those watching.

  I’m sure it was great fun to hang with Pauline Kael on Central Park West and let her pour poison in your ear. But At the Movies with Siskel and Ebert was a party that anyone could attend.

  [An experience that helped form me both as moviegoer and as writer was (since they’re all online) reading a million Ebert reviews about anything and everything. I still instinctually check to see if he wrote anything about movies I watch released while he was working. —Steve]

N.B.:

• An interview with Glen Powell and Richard Linklater.

• An interview with Russell Crowe.

• Lionsgate will distribute Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024).

• Some controversy in Australia over the amount of tax rebates given to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), which is probably in the nine figures.

• “Netflix to Open Massive Entertainment, Dining and Shopping Complexes in Two Cities in 2025”

• The origin of that line about the cuckoo clock from The Third Man (1949).

• An oral history of the “Vote for Pedro” t-shirt from Napoleon Dynamite (2004).

• Anouk Aimée died on Tuesday, June 18. R.I.P.

• Donald Sutherland died on Thursday, June 20. R.I.P.

  • on his performance in the final scene of Pride & Prejudice (2005).

• Bud S. Smith died on Sunday, June 23. R.I.P.

In theaters:

[Since every WRB Film Supplement is someone’s first: the movies are listed in approximate order of how good I think they are. Steve’s larks are the ones I recommend you see. 

I have been out of town for most of the last half of June, hence the limited list here; there will be some catching up in the next Film Supplement. —Steve]

Steve’s larks:

Hit Man (dir. Richard Linklater, May 24)

The danger of getting everything you want is the getting everything you want.

[For more on Hit Man as a sunny version of one of the bleakest films noir ever made, see Movies across the decades below.]

The rest:

The Dead Don’t Hurt (dir. Viggo Mortensen, May 31)

Aragorn (who also stars) should make all the Westerns he likes if he can keep making them like this. That said, the non-linear nature of this one makes it feel less like a Western and more like a series of nostalgic memories of Westerns, going “remember this scene? remember that one?” one after the other. This is all very cozy, as are the generic Western locations where the scenes take place. But underneath this are questions about what a man (Mortensen) owes his common-law wife (Vicky Krieps) (she refuses to marry him), what these two immigrants—her from French Canada, him from Denmark—owe the United States of America, and the painful fact that his decision to fight for the Union in the Civil War means leaving her, strong as she is, alone in the world of a Western, a world of unchecked male desire and male violence.

Tuesday (dir. Daina Oniunas-Pusić, June 7)

A barely-functional relationship between parent and child, the appearance of Death personified—you think of Bergman. Then you realize something it had never occurred to you to consider: part of the genius of The Seventh Seal (1957) is that Bergman did not make Death a talking parrot (voiced by Arinzé Kene) and then give him a lot of annoying things to say.

One of the underlying beliefs animating the commentary in this newsletter is that the true test of a great actor is not in making good material great but in making atrocious material salvageable. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is great.

Inside Out 2 (dir. Kelsey Mann, June 14)

It is possible to forgive a children’s movie for having a simplistic message, although the substance here—Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) sense of self goes from “I’m a good person.” to “I’m not good enough!” to an understanding that she has both good and bad traits—is an attempt to dramatize, what, the correct self-understanding of being a human being in the world? And one which, if you don’t have on this basic level before you’re thirteen years old, I doubt you ever will. (Much better to dramatize, as artists have done since forever, an actual fall from innocence and not what this movie comes up with in its search for something similar but devoid of the moral element.) This stupidity pretending to be cleverness also underpins most of the jokes—the “stream of consciousness” is a literal stream, the “sar-chasm” is a literal chasm, and none of it actually indicates anything about emotion.

Speaking of emotion, the film introduces new emotions to the ones present in Inside Out (2015): Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos). It proposes that these new emotions arrive with puberty, which anyone who has ever met a prepubescent child could tell you is not the case. [The idea that Envy arrives with puberty is especially silly, motivated as it is by a misguided belief in the inherent goodness and sweetness of small children. I could refute it with Augustine:

Who remindeth me of the sins of my infancy? for in Thy sight none is pure from sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day upon the earth. Who remindeth me? doth not each little infant, in whom I see what of myself I remember not? . . . Or was it then good, even for a while, to cry for what, if given, would hurt? bitterly to resent, that persons free, and its own elders, yea, the very authors of its birth, served it not? that many besides,  wiser than it, obeyed not the nod of its good pleasure? to do its best to strike and hurt, because commands were not obeyed, which had been obeyed to its hurt? The weakness then of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence. Myself have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother. Who knows not this?

But I could also refute it with experience. I recently saw friends of mine who have a daughter at the age where she knows about three words—and one of them is “mine.” —Steve]

Critical notes:

• Mike Fleming Jr. interviews Tom Rothman, Sony Motion Pictures Group chairman:

  I’m a believer in contrast, and I said this one year at CinemaCon; I think stars are more valuable than ever, but streaming doesn’t make stars. Only movies make stars. Stars are super valuable, in the right role. Dawn Steel taught me this 30 years ago and it’s as true then as now. A little less true during the studio system, but the minute that broke down, the operative rule became that talent follows material. So if you want a star, you’ve got to have great material. And the great material will get you a great filmmaker and that will get you a star. The stars that the audience want, they have their pick. So at a good studio, we’re not sellers at that point in the process, we’re buyers. We have to convince the best talent in the world to do it. The two co-equal things, is the quality of the material and the quality of the director. Believe me, the quality of the paycheck is way down the pecking order to the real talent in the world, who know how good is the material and how good is the filmmaker.

• Matt Singer:

  In pretty much every other way, though, this is not the ideal outcome for Hit Man—or for movie theaters, where I feel like this movie would have done well, assuming it wasn’t simultaneously playing at home for the low price of a monthly Netflix subscription. Powell co-wrote Hit Man with Linklater, and he clearly designed it as a showcase for all his talents. As Gary, Powell is charming, funny, handsome yet likable, and very willing to look silly or vulnerable. In another era, this would have cemented Powell as a major movie star after his recent roles in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and Anyone But You (2023).

  But in that other era, Hit Man would have played in theaters, where the sheer size of the film image lends the people on the big screen a mythic, larger-than-life quality. At home . . . everyone seems smaller, less special, less spectacular—even someone as hunky as Glen Powell. I’m starting to wonder if that’s one reason why, as so many have noted and complained lately, we seem to be witnessing the death of traditional movie stardom. On television, stars don’t shine nearly as brightly.

• Matthew Ball:

  At its peak in the late 1940s, moviegoing represented an astonishing 1.3% of all personal consumption expenditures in the United States, or $1.30 of every $100 spent . . . By 2019, this share had fallen from $1 in every $100 to 9¢ (a 95% total decline that contrasts with the roughly 82% drop in attendance). . . .

  Even among ticketed spectator amusements—live entertainment (which is mostly concerts but also includes performance theater, ice shows, etc.) and live sports—moviegoing has lost share. In the 1920s to 1950s, motion pictures were $80 or more over every $100 spent on a spectator amusement in the United States. Today, it’s less than $15.

  [I don’t think I had ever put together that from the 1930s to the 1950s the average American went to the movies 20 to 30 times a year. The argument in here that, if anything, ticket prices should increase surprised me at first but might have something going for it (especially because, contrary to popular misconception, ticket prices have been stable for decades adjusted for inflation). —Steve]

Movies across the decades:

Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder, 1944), Hit Man (dir. Richard Linklater, 2024)

Read more

Links:

• Two in The New Yorker:

  • Burkhard Bilger interviews George Miller:

    Bilger: Do you think the pace of film editing will continue to accelerate?

    Miller: I don’t think that this will naturally lead to faster and faster films. But you should be aware, as you are making the film, that the audience is capable of understanding things that it couldn’t in the past. I remember a quote: “Individually an audience might be comprised of idiots, collectively they are never wrong.” I really think that’s true. People come to cinema loaded to the gills with all this learning of a relatively new language. They watch movies and pick up the rhythm of them. They are visually literate. They are narratively, dramatically literate, but not necessarily in a way they can articulate. And, collectively, it is quite astonishing.

    Very early on, I made a point of rewatching films in the cinema when there were lots of people. One film that had a lot of influence on Mad Max was What’s Up, Doc? (1972). Every Saturday night in Melbourne, I would go and watch the film, because I just loved the audience’s laughter, and knowing exactly where that laughter is. Then I went to Hong Kong, in a packed cinema with standing room in the aisles, and the laughing was consistent with Melbourne. There is a collective response of audiences that is constantly playing in the back of your mind. You just have to trust it.

  • Katy Waldman on the idea of love animating The Idea of You (2024):

    If a romantic comedy is a machine that converts shame into self-affirmation, what kind of shame does The Idea of You want to expiate? The obvious answer is the shame of being an older woman and a mom. The film seems to engage and then relieve the shame of middle-aged maternity by crafting an insanely aspirational middle-aged mother for viewers to glom on to. But Solène’s (Anne Hathaway) mom-ness remains so gestural and impressionistic for most of the movie that this answer feels unsatisfying. Showalter conveys an idea of motherhood but not the realized and embodied thing. A truer statement—and the characteristic that distinguishes The Idea of You as a rom-com—is that the film, with its Wattpad and Archive of Our Own lineage, wishes to expiate the shame of being a fan.

    [A common kind of bad rom-com writing makes the leads blanks with the idea that this makes it easier for an audience to identify with them—to be fans of them, and root for them. —Steve]

• In Air Mail, Blanca Schofield with an oral history of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). Simon Callow:

  When I was sent the script and told they wanted me to play Gareth, I said: “I bet I’m the funeral. I’m bound to die in this.” And so indeed I was. I die in most things. The appetite of the British public for my death is limitless.

  It’s a fascinating idea to follow a group of people who go to weddings a lot and never manage to get hitched themselves. But the thing that is brilliantly daring is the funeral. It’s Shakespearean. In the sense that Gareth believes in cakes and ales, he is like Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. He wages war on every kind of puritanism and narrowness of spirit. Also, a minute or so before he dies, he says, “I was adored once,” quoting Belch’s friend Andrew Aguecheek. As I look back over my career, Gareth is one of the parts that I’ve really nailed.

  [Basically every character in Four Weddings and a Funeral has a Shakespearean tinge except for the leads. —Steve]

• In RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz on Palpatine as a great screen villain:

  Palpatine’s (Ian McDiarmid) psychological seduction of Anakin (Hayden Christensen) is one of the great ironic tragedies in science fiction. Anakin is born into slavery and escapes it through induction into the Jedi order, only to end up in permanent servitude to a far more diabolical and powerful master. The cocky, gifted teenager has such a huge ego that he can’t handle having to remain an apprentice until the Jedi tell him he's ready to become a knight. In his peevish immaturity, he opens himself to corruption by a man who plays him like a ragtime piano and is sentenced to a permanent apprenticeship. You’d have to visit the Twilight Zone to find a more ironically perfect fate.

Reviews:

• In Fast Company, A. S. Hamrah reviews Unfrosted (2024):

  The nostalgia factor is an optical illusion. It’s not atomic destruction we are nostalgic for, nor addicting children to face-smearing goo, finger-coating dust, or Gameboys. It is massive success through licensing and franchising we love and want in on. The bourgeois-to-billionaire class that Jerry Seinfeld is part of doesn’t even go to movies anymore, as he pointed out. To understand why these movies are made we must study the executives who greenlit them, because public taste is no longer reflected in the mass production of culture at this level. How did we get the masses to eat Pop-Tarts? Now there’s a story. And in the case of Unfrosted, one that is not lying about being futzed with, rewritten, fudged, and made up.

  In his recent book Foreverism (2023), University of Georgia nostalgia scholar Grafton Tanner writes that movie studios have a different view of the past. The real strategy there, Tanner theorizes, is “to keep the past present so we aren’t nostalgic for it anymore.” “Nostalgia,” he writes, “is experienced when one fondly aches for the past. Foreverism, on the other hand, will implore you to revive the past and save it from ever dying again,” in order to maintain the current system of production in a way that disallows actual longing for anything better.

• Two reviews of films directed by Francis Ford Coppola:

  • In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri reviews Megalopolis (2024):

    There is nothing in Megalopolis that feels like something out of a “normal” movie. It has its own logic and cadence and vernacular. The characters speak in archaic phrases and words, mixing shards of Shakespeare, Ovid, and at one point straight-up Latin. Some characters speak in rhyme, others just in high-minded prose that feels like maybe it should be in verse. At one point, Adam Driver does the entire “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. Why? I’m not exactly sure. But it sure sounds good.

    • Katie Kadue: “hamlet also does the entire ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy from hamlet for no reason but it also sounds good”

  • In 4Columns, Melissa Anderson reviews Coppola’s updated and restored version of One from the Heart (1982, 2024):

    In pleasing contrast with this optical razzle-dazzle is the demotic speech of the characters, particularly the central pair. The unadorned dialogue of Frannie (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest) tethers this fantasia to firmer ground; their acrimonious exchanges accurately reflect the wobbly language of heat-of-the moment insults (“You used to have a pretty good build. . . . Now you’re startin’ to look like . . . an egg!” Frannie taunts her boyfriend). Forrest and Garr had each worked with Coppola before—they both have secondary parts in The Conversation (1974), and he also appears in Apocalypse Now (1979)—but One from the Heart provides the added pleasure of seeing her as a lead, a rarity. (Tootsie, which also opened in ’82, features Garr in an emblematic supporting role as Sandy, who, much like the woman playing her, is a character actress who never quite gets the recognition she’s due.) Garr, who began her film career as a dancer in Elvis Presley vehicles, further buoys Coppola’s delectable movie with her vivacity—whether Frannie is tangoing with Ray (Raul Julia), admiring her own physique in a mirror, or delivering my favorite line: “I wanna live . . . I wanna go out with a bunch of guys. I want erotic things to happen.”

• In our sister publication across the pond, Michael Wood reviews La chimera (2024):

  Arthur (Josh O’Connor) loses himself at this point. He isn’t in prison and he isn’t free. Time passes and he wanders from place to place, looking scruffier and scruffier. At last he comes back to the little town and finds that Italia (Carol Duarte) and some other women have set up a commune in a disused railway station—they are adopting the liberation implied by a myth that Etruscan women ruled, and Etruscan men did as they were told. Arthur is invited to stay and almost does. At least he is composed now, and cleaned up, and this would be a good place to end the movie, as Rohrwacher obviously knows. But she is not going to do that. One more tomb awaits Arthur, and you need to see the movie to learn what happens there. Actually, even when you’ve seen it you won’t be quite sure, because several fascinating interpretations of the events are possible. Judge ye. What would Orpheus do in this situation?

• In The Point, reviews The Zone of Interest (2023):

  Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) justifies her demand with an impassioned speech about their ideals. She is a true believer—she and Rudolf (Christian Friedel) met on a farm, both enthusiasts of a Nazi back-to-the-land movement—and makes an appeal to the beliefs she and Rudolf share. They would have to drag me out of here, she tells him. “This is our home,” she says. “Everything the Führer said about how to live is how we do. Go East. Lebensraum. This is our Lebensraum.” This isn’t just a domestic squabble; Glazer is making a serious and profound argument about the way fascist ideology suffuses domestic life, so that Lebensraum becomes not just a national program but an individual ideal. He is also, not incidentally, casually dismissing, as he does throughout the film, what has been a kind of ludicrous debate about how much Hedwig knew about her husband’s activities. In the memoir Rudolf wrote in prison, he claimed Hedwig never knew about the gas chambers, a claim some historians have apparently taken seriously. The film tacitly reveals how absurd an idea it is.

  [Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which, as Steven D. Greydanus once pointed out, was not originally titled “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark,” is more subtle than it’s given credit for here. (Inglourious Basterds (2009), a movie more or less about Raiders, also misses this, but that says more about Tarantino and the flaws of his projects of historical revisionism.) —Steve]

• In the Times, reviews MoviePass, MovieCrash (2024):

  That story is, in a sense, a tale as old as time. MoviePass in fact existed all the way back in 2011, co-founded by Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt. The story they tell in the documentary is one of spotting a need in the market—a threat to theatrical exhibition of films posed, in part, by the slow growth of streaming services—and of figuring out a sustainable way to fill it. The answer was MoviePass, which cost more at the time (I believe I paid $49.99 per month in 2013, which was still a bargain) and seemed poised for success.

  But as Spikes and Watt explain it, MoviePass is another story of Black entrepreneurs who, along with other underrepresented demographics, struggle to find investment capital and investor confidence in the market, creating something groundbreaking and then losing it to overconfident white men. There’s no doubt that, under Lowe and Farnsworth, a promising service was run directly into the ground. The frustration that Spikes and Watt felt as they were pushed out of the company is palpable. And when Lowe opines on camera that Spikes “wasn’t being a productive member of the team” when he voiced his concerns, you can feel that frustration, too.

N.B.:

• Part of the estate that inspired The Philadelphia Story (1940) is for sale.

• The best names in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024). [I like to think of the pseudo-Latin of many of the names in the Mad Max world as the equivalent of Anglo-Saxon coins with incorrect Latin, or just random letters from the Latin alphabet, on it; after the collapse of civilization, why not try to claim some of the prestige and power of the Roman Empire for yourself? —Steve]

• The world of tiny independent theaters in the UK.

• The story of a ten-year-old who spent a week unsupervised at a movie theater in 1947.

• Ted Sarandos’ son believes that “on your phone” is an appropriate way to watch Lawrence of Arabia (1962). You, however, can see Lawrence on the big screen this August. [I saw Lawrence at the AFI in Silver Spring last month, it was unforgettable. —Chris]

• Roger Corman died on Thursday, May 9. R.I.P.

  • on two very different films he directed in the early 1960s: “The Intruder (1962) could have established Roger Corman as an artist. Instead, films like X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963) proved he’d been one all along.”

In theaters:

[Since every WRB Film Supplement is someone’s first: the movies are listed in approximate order of how good I think they are. Steve’s larks are the ones I recommend you see. —Steve]

Steve’s larks:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (dir. George Miller, May 24)

Roger Ebert opened his obituary for Audrey Hepburn with “She was, a critic once wrote, the last of the silent stars—because her eyes almost made it unnecessary for her to speak.” Anya Taylor-Joy is not Hepburn—no one is—but here, in a film where she has hardly any dialogue, her eyes have some of the same power.

[For more on Furiosa and how it fits in with George Miller’s recent work, see Movies across the decades below.]

The rest:

Wildcat (dir. Ethan Hawke, May 3)

There is Flannery O’Connor, the author (played here by Maya Hawke, who also plays the female leads in adaptations of some of O’Connor’s short stories interspersed throughout), and then there is Flannery O’Connor, symbol of a certain kind of literary Catholic’s insecurity about the general lack of Catholic contributions to English literature. To Wildcat’s credit as both a film and as an interpretation of O’Connor’s work, it is not particularly concerned with the latter—could a reader unaware of her life conclude with certainty from her stories that their author was a Catholic and not part of a Calvinist denomination? Even the inclusion of her line about the Eucharist—“if it’s a symbol, to hell with it,” delivered here as a retort to Elizabeth Hardwick (Willa Fitzgerald)—is more of a defense of religious faith in general in the context the film gives it.

O’Connor’s life is not, on its surface, particularly cinematic. The choice to film a number of her stories and thread them through feels like a necessary device to get the running time up to a normal feature length. It also indicates an awareness that, while O’Connor suffering from lupus is worthy of comment, it is her stories that create an interest in the life of this one woman suffering from lupus. (The two minutes where Robert Lowell (Philip Ettinger) and Hardwick are on screen together have more typical biopic incident in its glimpse of their lives than the rest of the film combined.) Instead, it is content to sit with O’Connor as she works out how writing her stories, stories that most people in her life think are strange, can be a form of devotion to God. If this is not incisive—let alone revelatory—it is honest.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Wes Ball, May 10)

Several reviewers have pointed out that the central question underlying this film—Caesar has been gone for a few hundred years; what did he teach, and how should the apes apply it to the present day, when the ruling authorities claim him?—echoes certain questions Christians faced under Constantine and his successors. What those reviewers have neglected to say about this reimagining is that it comes from the lurid mind of someone who believes that imperial goons were hunting down all those fourth-century Baptists. Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), an ape warlord, suggests that Caesar’s teachings endorse subjection to him. On the other side is Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan member of a religious order just barely holding on. As if to underline that he represents the Baptists, he preserves books from before the collapse of human civilization—Proximus Caesar has no use for such things, depending on a tradition he is inventing as he goes along.

Indulging in these theological reflections distracts from such unpleasantries as the plot, which takes two and a half hours to get to the starting point of a more interesting plot. This more interesting plot will, no doubt, feature in the next installment of this series.

Poolman (dir. Chris Pine, May 10)

Chris Pine (who also co-wrote the film and stars as the titular poolman) is a big fan of Chinatown (1973) and The Big Lebowski (1998). This means he has good taste. Here, he has tried to build a whole movie around that love by pulling one very lightly adapted scene after another from them. There is no freshness to this. Roman Polanski and the Coen brothers are much better directors than Pine. His mashing these two movies together drains the Lebowski material of its hangout vibes and the Chinatown material of its menace, and his performance as the poolman is an Halloween costume imitation of Jeff Bridges as the Dude. The homage reaches its nadir when the poolman and his buddies decide to seek inspiration for their quest to investigate LA malfeasance and corruption by watching Chinatown. (Since he owns it on VHS, and has clearly watched it many times, he must know the ending—what does he make of it? For that matter, what does Pine?) Later, one of his buddies uses the trick of putting a watch under a car tire so it will break when the car drives away and show when the car left. She describes this as “like Chinatown.” Some free advice: if you are describing something you are doing as “like Chinatown,” stop doing it.

Robot Dreams (dir. Pablo Berger, May 31)

The story of a dog—in this world animals are stand-ins for people—who befriends and then loses a robot in 1980s New York City (the film reminds viewers of the time period by showing the Twin Towers at least a dozen times) is not without a surface charm that evaporates upon consideration of the scenario. Dog (this is his name; at least, it’s what he puts on some paperwork) comes into the robot by seeing an ad on late-night TV suggesting that lonely people can buy robots to address that problem. This is not how you make friends; it may be how you acquire a mail-order bride. The time period and the robot’s sexlessness can only do so much to point away from the facts: Dog is the sort of person who would today dream about an AI girlfriend. What does he do when he loses the robot? He mourns for a while, and he tries to find the robot, and when he fails—he goes out and buys a new robot. There is pathos here—it comes from the robot seeming more human.

Babes (dir. Pamela Adlon, May 17)

There is a kind of comedy so determined to make its points about society that it forgets to do any jokes. Babes, at least, remembers to include the jokes. Most of them are about bodily functions, though. Being animated by the comedic stylings of a nine-year-old fits poorly with a story about a single woman (Ilana Glazer) who gets pregnant from a one-night stand and decides to keep the baby, relying on her best friend (Michelle Buteau), who is married with kids, throughout her pregnancy. It moves through all the obligatory points—the different expectations placed on friends and family, the assumptions made about a pregnant woman when the father is not in the picture, the actual physical experience of pregnancy—but it merely nods at the existence of these points in lieu of saying anything. Only the most patronizing kind of film would expect its audiences to be satisfied with the appearances of what they recognize and expect to see; a movie of this kind should be better than that.

Back to Black (dir. Sam Taylor-Johnson, May 17)

Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela, given the impossible task of sounding like Winehouse while singing and doing a decent job with it) died at 27; unlike such figures as Hendrix and Morrison, who produced lasting music more or less right up to their deaths, the last essential piece of music she made is her “Valerie” cover with Mark Ronson, released right after she turned 24. An exploration of why this happened would make a good movie.

But Back to Black is not an exploration of why it happened. Its main idea is that Winehouse was, more or less, just like that, and its one move beyond that—suggesting that her inability to get pregnant sent her spiraling down—still has to be traced to the unexplained drug and alcohol abuse. This is the explanation you would use if you wanted to paint the living members of Winehouse’s family in the best possible light, as you would expect in a film her estate signed off on. It smacks of Colonel Parker’s alleged statement about what he would do after the death of Elvis: “I’ll keep on managing him!”

Critical notes:

• In , on trailers:

  Assigned seating fundamentally altered how all this works. With assigned seating, you didn’t need to get there early, which devalued the pre-show advertisements. Knowing that your seats were yours no matter what, you didn’t even have to get there in time to see the trailers—and with the expansion of the number of trailers and the mixing of ads for cars and insurance into the trailers, it’s no wonder people started showing up 15 or 20 minutes after the listed showtime. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been at an AMC and seen people straggle in just before or just after a movie started.

  This severed a vital link in the information and excitement chain that theaters need to thrive. As great as YouTube may be for generating views of trailers, there’s nothing quite like watching a mini-movie play out ahead of something you’re already at a theater and excited to see. And there’s something to be said for having a captive audience; a trailer on YouTube is just one more window in the floating morass of entertainment options. A trailer in a theater dominates your attention.

Movies across the decades:

Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller, 2015), Three Thousand Years of Longing (dir. George Miller, 2022), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (dir. George Miller, 2024)

Read more

Links:

• In , Bill Ryan on Quentin Tarantino’s self-mythologizing:

  I don’t think people are wrong to guess that Tarantino is afraid of screwing up: He wants to be perfect, and by imposing that limit, he’s making his dream of a “perfect” filmography seem achievable. There are other legendary directors whose filmographies are similarly short, of course, but they weren’t deliberately planned that way. Tarantino’s hero Sergio Leone, for example, died with eight films done but various projects in planning stages. And while Stanley Kubrick, whom Tarantino has denied having any affinity for anyway, pursued his own brand of perfection, this tended to block him, and he wound up making just five films between 1970 and his death in 1999. Tarantino, to my knowledge, is the only artist, in any medium, who sees their collected works as being compact by design.

• In Liberties, Sheila O’Malley on approaching film through the actors:

  I sit in screening rooms asking the film: “What are you working on?” Different films try to do different things. Be open to what it’s attempting, I tell myself, even if it misses the mark. Asking “What are you working on?” also helps when the film is maybe not made “for me.” If a film is pitched at 14-year-old girls then a middle-aged man might not like it or “relate.” But personal preference is irrelevant. Not everything is for you. The Twilight franchise was dismissed and mocked by the critics who found it silly and stupid, or commentators who worried the “message” was dangerous. Both groups completely missed the obvious: whatever the franchise’s stylistic or thematic faults, it tapped into a generation’s motherlode of passion and yearning in a way few films do. Twilight (2008) also launched two of the most interesting acting careers in recent memory, which would have seemed absurd back in the height of Twilight mania. Some expressed surprise when Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson were “good” in later projects or that they worked with great directors like Olivier Assayas, Kelly Reichardt, David Cronenberg, James Gray, and Claire Denis. There should have been no surprise. The teenage girls already told you they were good. You just didn’t listen. 

• In Reverse Shot, Leonardo Goi interviews Bertrand Bonello, director of The Beast (2024):

  Josée [Deshaies, his frequent cinematographer] and I have worked on so many films through the years, and she’s always been integral to shaping their looks. In The Beast, for instance, she was the one who came up with the idea of shooting the 2044 segments in 4:3, to give Gabrielle’s (Léa Seydoux) life a more claustrophobic feel, and to film the 1910 section in 35mm. But the rest comes from the script. I mean, all through the chapter set in 2014 Léa is, I guess, in 60 percent of all her scenes alone in a house, looking at laptops and screens. Where the sections set in 1910 are all in 35mm, the rest is digital. That’s what our lives are like today. We are surrounded by screens, bombarded with images that come at us from all directions. Which is to say that the film in those moments is kind of a reflection of our everyday experience, of the textures we are familiar with.

• In City Journal, Stephen Eide on Woody Allen’s New York:

  As he himself put it, Allen gave his hometown the “wonderland” or “rose-colored” treatment, one that deals heavily in nostalgia. [Manhattan (1979)] is shot in black and white. Aesthetically, Allen has always gravitated toward the old New York of his youth. That’s the city that, as Manhattan’s voiceover puts it, he “romanticized . . . all out of proportion.” Morally, though, he has always been at home in the post-1960s social order. The plot of Manhattan centers around compulsive adultery and the Allen character’s relationship with a teenager. Life in the big city, per Manhattan, promises drama, if not happiness. New York is where life is lived on a higher plane, with sometimes tragic implications. Stable people don’t fit in New York City. (In this respect, see also Hannah and Her Sisters, from 1986.) You want a less complicated life?, Manhattan asks. Move to Connecticut.

Reviews:

• Two reviews of The Conversation (1974) for its 50th anniversary:

  • In The Guardian, :

    Produced between The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), The Conversation was the only film that Coppola made in that peerless decade (which he ended with Apocalypse Now (1979)) that he scripted alone, without drawing from a literary source. As such, it feels uniquely personal, even for a director who famously invests so much of himself, creatively and financially, in his art. Though the film isn’t officially adapted from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up, Coppola does for sound what Antonioni did for picture, using one incomplete morsel of information to get at a truth that proves persistently elusive. It’s a potent metaphor for the movies themselves, which make an art of constructing reality from disassembled pieces, but it also speaks to a wider sense of unease that was gripping the culture at the time.

  • In The Ringer, Adam Nayman:

    The pitch-black joke at the heart of The Conversation is that Harry’s (Gene Hackman) preternatural skill at capturing sound—the instincts that make him, in the words of a colleague, “the best bugger on the West Coast”—doesn’t give him the ability to interpret it properly. Slowly, that conjoined, paradoxical sense of authority and confusion boomerangs back on the viewer, whose understanding of events is carefully filtered through Harry’s own (ultimately mistaken) perceptions. Like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown—which was released the same year—The Conversation is a movie about a character whose own brilliance becomes a liability because he can’t see (or in this case, hear) the bigger picture. The two films also share a theme of institutional corruption that couldn’t have been more timely, but where Polanski’s neo-noir used the social and political topography of the 1930s to critique rapacious late-capitalist practices, Coppola’s artistic antenna channeled a zeitgeist in which secretly recorded audiotape was understood as a kind of smoking gun. That the film hadn’t actually been inspired by Watergate or the Nixon tapes didn’t matter. In a moment when surveillance tech was becoming interwoven into every aspect of daily life, The Conversation quickly became a conversation piece—an allegory about the collapsing gap between a generation’s public and private lives.

• In Angelus, Joseph Joyce reviews Civil War (2024):

  The press is a neutral party, with badges and vests that provide at least the illusion of immunity. As Lee (Kirsten Dunst) expounds repeatedly to her unwanted protégé (Cailee Spaeny), objectivity is both ethical journalism and a common-sense survival tactic; no one likes feeling judged, with those carrying out war crimes particularly touchy about it. Garland shares this distance, never delving into the whos and whys of the war over the immediate now. The impartiality is not a bug but quite literally the whole feature: Civil War ponders the impossibility and necessity of objectivity, and how it corrodes your soul regardless.

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Merve Emre reviews Anatomy of a Fall (2023):

  What kind of fiction is her life? The mother (Sandra Hüller) is a writer of autofiction. Her son (Milo Machado-Graner) is a visionary of realism. Autofiction needs realism to save it from destroying what it knows; from solipsism and self-indulgence; from destroying other peoples’ lives in the pursuit of self-creation. Realism needs autofiction to liberate it from the imagination; to charge its claims to reality with truth, even if they are not, strictly speaking, real. Anatomy of a Fall is not truly a story about marriage, good, bad, whatever. It is a story about how cinema can reconcile these estranged genres of prose. More prosaically, it is about how a mother needs her son, and how a son needs his mother, even—or especially—when their visions of life diverge. Together, they can do anything, change anything, create anything. For some, this may be an ennobling prospect. For others—a husband and father, perhaps—it may be a terrifying one.

Reviews of books:

• In our sister publication across the pond, Michael Wood reviews three books from the world of Cahiers du Cinéma (The Cinema House and the World: The “Cahiers Du Cinéma” Years, 1962–1981, by Serge Daney, translated by Christine Pichini, 2022; Footlights: Critical Notebook 1970–1982, by Serge Daney, translated by Nicholas Elliott, 2023; Reading with Jean-Luc Godard, edited by Timothy Barnard and Kevin J. Hayes, 2023):

  Writing means something slightly different in each of these cases, but they all point to the language of cinema, or to cinema as language, a bundle of aural and visual materials waiting to be read. Roland Barthes’ concept of écriture hovers in the background, along with his distinction between texts that are lisible (“We call any readerly text a classic text”) and scriptible (“The writerly text is ourselves writing”). A lot of writers don’t write in this sense and those who do gain a special privilege. The writer in the cinema is the person who creates the art, whether it’s the director or the producer or an actor. Or even a writer. There is also an element of liberation, of refusing a cultural supremacy. “When we saw some movies,” Godard wrote, “we were finally delivered from the terror of writing. We were no longer crushed by the specter of the great writers.”

N.B.:

• Finally, someone willing to say it: Alain Delon is simply too attractive.

• Movies sure do like blowing up D.C.

• “The Rom-Com That’s Responsible for My Marriage” [Aren’t they all? Isn’t that what Stanley Cavell was writing about? —Steve]

• An oral history of the making of Go (1999).

• A profile of Shelley Duvall.

• “And the streaming hit still can’t match the cultural footprint of the theatrical flop, which is getting multiple bites at the apple because it was in theaters first and a theatrical release buys you a curiosity factor that can’t be matched by faceless algorithms and cynical auto-play high jinks.”

• Eleanor Coppola died on Friday, April 12. R.I.P.

• Bernard Hill died on Sunday, May 5. R.I.P.

In theaters:

[Since every WRB Film Supplement is someone’s first: the movies are listed in approximate order of how good I think they are. Steve’s larks are the ones I recommend you see. —Steve]

Steve’s larks:

Hundreds of Beavers (dir. Mike Cheslik, January 26)

In WRB—Apr. 20, 2024 we quoted Michel Butor: “In the same way, the most useful critic is the person who cannot stand to have certain books, paintings or pieces of music be talked about so little or so poorly, and the sense of obligation is as pressing in the area of criticism as in any other.” Watch this, and then talk about it, and talk about it with praise. Some guys with $150,000, bad animal costumes, and a deep love of silent film and Looney Tunes gags went into the woods of Wisconsin and made the funniest movie in years, recounting the deeds of Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) as he seeks to trap hundreds of beavers to win the hand of his girl (Olivia Graves) from her father (Doug Mancheski). Like many of the funniest movies ever made—The Lady Eve (1941), The Producers (1967), Hot Fuzz (2007)—its palpable glee in presenting the viewer with a new joke every five seconds is infectious, and its arrogance in keeping up that pace at feature length is completely justified. 

The Beast (dir. Bertrand Bonello, April 5)

In three lifetimes—one her current one, two in the past—Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux in all lifetimes) meets Louis (George MacKay in all lifetimes) and feels an inexplicable draw to him. In 1910, she is a pianist who meets him in their elite social world; in 2014, she is an aspiring actress and he an incel; and in 2044 (the present, in the film’s world), she encounters him at a facility dedicated to removing people’s strong emotions by going through their past lives, intended to make them more employable in a world where AI has led to mass unemployment. The hazy, dreamlike quality of the film as it flips back and forth between the timelines and retraces the events with more detail each time is frightening on its own. It becomes even more frightening as more and more detail comes back and memory itself becomes a menace—what happens to 1910 Louis? How violent is 2014 Louis? Is 2044 Louis, in the end, different? What can her affection and her love accomplish? “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

Civil War (dir. Alex Garland, April 12)

Alex Garland believing that he made a love letter to journalists is a great example of why artists cannot be trusted to interpret their own work. Applying one of the simpler heuristics—look at which characters are alive and which are dead at the end—has an old-timer (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a woman who got into journalism to effect change (Kirsten Dunst) dead. Alive are a man who claims that violence gives him an erection (Wagner Moura) and someone with no experience whose naïveté gets several people killed (Cailee Spaeny). The theoretical purpose of their trip to Washington is to ask the tyrannical president (Nick Offerman) hard questions; when they find him, what happens is—not that. With friends like this, does journalism need enemies?

[For more on photojournalists in film, see Movies across the decades below.]

The rest:

Coup de Chance (dir. Woody Allen, April 5)

“Woody Allen’s best in a while” means nothing, so: this is actually good, if a bit by numbers. That the actors all speak French, a language Allen does not know, seems to have freed up his mental energy to think about and apply effort to things that used to be among his strengths, like blocking and cinematography. Maybe life is all chance, Woody Allen thinks so—but his fiftieth movie is not providing new information about his thoughts. It does, however, provide new jokes, which are usually funny, even if in a wry chuckle sort of way. Like Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) the love triangle in a modern European setting reads like a kind of response to Rohmer, who saw the world, chance, and love triangles quite differently.

Challengers (dir. Luca Guadagnino, April 26)

Sex! SEX! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling. If there is anything here beyond that surface of attractive people being horny and confused—confused because horny, horny because confused—while synths play it can thank the film’s text ostensibly declaring that women will distract you from the homoerotic pursuit of excellence with your bro. “Tennis is a relationship,” Tashi Duncan (Zendaya, impossible to read) says, and only through playing it competitively against each other for the first time are Art (Mike Faist, a golden retriever) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor, aiming with success at Byron) able to restore a bond they destroyed by fighting over her.

The Fall Guy (dir. David Leitch, May 3)

The lighthearted jokes at Tom Cruise’s expense—this is an action movie in love with past action movies, and more specifically with having characters reference them—underline that the commentary on the business of making movies here is basically the same as in Cruise’s most recent films. Like in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) the villains are intent on using technology as a substitute and replacement for human beings; it “improves” on those by explicitly making it about movies (not as if Cruise’s were particularly subtle). There is also a romance between a director (Emily Blunt) and a stuntman (Ryan Gosling), which is the most charming part of the film and deserved to occupy more of it. Computers can’t love, after all.

Monkey Man (dir. Dev Patel, April 5)

“Indian John Wick (2014)” is precisely wrong. The violence in both is skillfully done, but there it is balletic, and here it is—violent, part of a revenge story in which the Hindu nationalists who destroyed the home and killed the mother of the Monkey Man (Dev Patel) now find themselves on the receiving end. The usual method of making an action movie political—make the bad guys associated with a political movement or enemy state—was apparently thought insufficient. The middle hour, then, has the Monkey Man recover at a temple run by hijra persecuted by the Hindu nationalists. During his convalescence and further training he has multiple flashbacks to the death of his mother, which provide neither much additional proof of the villainy of the Hindu nationalists nor any forward momentum. The set pieces on either end are very bloody indeed.

Femme (dir. Sam H. Freeman, Ng Choon Ping, April 5)

That the desire for revenge frequently has an erotic charge is not a new discovery, but rarely is it so literal as here. Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a drag queen who gets viciously beaten on the street, later sees his attacker, a chav—this takes place in London—named Preston (George MacKay), in a gay bathhouse. Since Preston keeps this part of his life a secret, Jules conceives a plan to get revenge by filming Preston having sex with him and putting it on the internet to out him. The existing power dynamics of sex and race (Preston is white, Jules is black) blend into those created by Jules’ plan, where he has the power of knowing Preston’s secret but, as the pursuer in what becomes a romantic relationship, is at the mercy of the pursued. It would be difficult for any film to hold these threads together; this one cannot and retreats to a pat ending, even if it tries hard before it gives in.

La chimera (dir. Alice Rohrwacher, March 29)

A mention of the Etruscans is a sign that whatever follows is likely to have a tenuous connection to reality. And the connection Arthur (​​Josh O’Connor, aiming with success at Byron), an English archeologist, has left to the world is very tenuous; he has lost (how and why is obscure) his girlfriend Beniamina (Yile Vianello) and now spends his time sleepwalking through Tuscany finding Etruscan tombs with his associates, digging them up, and selling the artifacts on the black market. The work brings him no pleasure—he seems happiest when in the tombs, taking them in. The attractions of the world above, most specifically of Italia (Carol Duarte), a woman staying with Beniamina’s mother (Isabella Rossellini), can only do so much to divert him. The film’s world is that which Arthur’s eyes see; all very interesting, but its joy, and even its problems, do little for him.

Deep Sky (dir. Nathaniel Kahn, April 19)

The images produced by deep-space telescopes (in the case of the James Webb Space Telescope, infrared) are a kind of scientifically useful art and not representative of anything the human eye can see; they still look great on the big screen.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (dir. Guy Ritchie, April 19)

Guy Ritchie is never going to make an incompetent action movie, but he can phone one in. Specifically, he can phone in a version of all the cool scenes in Inglourious Basterds (2009) that strip all the cool out, as if high-wire espionage and killing Nazis was about clocking in and waiting to clock out. (His recent Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023) was also phoned-in, but it was fun and benefitted from featuring Hugh Grant, whose manner fits perfectly in a phoned-in movie. Both fun and Hugh Grant are absent here.)

Wicked Little Letters (dir. Thea Sharrock, March 29)

Incongruous Profanity: The Movie. The incongruity is provided by the setting and situation; in the 1920s, Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman), a spinster in a small English seaside town, receives a series of obscene letters in the mail, which her mother (Gemma Jones) and father (Timothy Spall) suspect are coming from Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), an uncouth Irish immigrant who lives next door. The viewer will solve the mystery quicker than the girlboss female police officer (Anjana Vasan) does. She, however, has the disadvantage of dealing with the male police officers in the department (Hugh Skinner, Paul Chahidi), who devote most of their time to imitating the flavor of Mitchell and Webb routines. Said routines are the only source of humor other than the incongruous profanity, and even Olivia Coleman can only do so much with that.

Hard Miles (dir. R. J. Daniel Hanna, April 19)

A teacher and coach (Matthew Modine) imparts life lessons to troubled youth through sports. It is exactly as rote as that description sounds; at least the sport (cycling) and the location (the American West) let the story play out against impressive vistas.

Unsung Hero (dir. Joel Smallbone, Richard Ramsey, April 26)

Never has a film about a singer-songwriter shown less interest in the music of the artist (we see her singing one song) or her creative process (not shown). Instead it provides a family drama. (That Joel Smallbone is the sister of the artist in question probably explains both.)

Boy Kills World (dir. Moritz Mohr, April 26)

Video game violence with a sarcastic voiceover that starts grating almost immediately, indicative of a lack of confidence in the images on screen. It somehow has a twist which is both obviously foreseeable in broad strokes and makes no sense in specific details.

Sasquatch Sunset (dir. Nathan Zellner, David Zellner, April 12)

Seeing Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg made up to look like sasquatches is interesting for five minutes, which leaves the other eighty-something unaccounted for.

Critical notes:

• In The Guardian, Zach Schonfeld on musical biopics:

  Meanwhile, in February this year, Sam Mendes announced that he’s at work on a Beatles biopic. Except it’s not just one biopic; Mendes plans to direct four feature-length films—one from each Beatle’s point of view—all for release in 2027. Even the most devout Beatles obsessives have strained to consider this a good idea.

  It’s time to admit: we’ve reached Peak Music Biopic. Let’s give it a rest. With the exception of Maestro (2023) (which, despite its flaws, surely reflects Bradley Cooper’s vision and artistry), these movies feel less like auteur-driven cinema than estate-sanctioned exercises in brand management, with their easy, IP-adjacent appeal juiced by access to renowned songbooks. Just as Heaven’s Gate (1980) now epitomizes the hubris of the New Hollywood era, this quadrupedal Beatles project may come to symbolize the indulgent excess of today’s musical biopics.

• In Little White Lies, David Jenkins interviews Victor Erice about Close Your Eyes (2024):

  From the time of the Lumière brothers—and I’m not coming from a romantic point of view, I’m not nostalgic for this era—the only thing that’s left is the cinemas themselves. But the places where spectators go to watch films are also disappearing. Now people watch film on TV, computers and mobile phones. The true place to watch a film is in the cinema. But the big corporations are getting rid of them. I think they should be kept. It draws me back to the Middle Ages where poetry was spoken in public rooms or squares, and I see cinemas as serving a similar function. When I was a child, seeing a film meant being out of the house, with my family, with my friends, socializing. It is possible that cinemas are residual now, and that’s what’s happening. It’s an anthropological change.

Movies across the decades:

Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Civil War (dir. Alex Garland, 2024)

Read more

Links:

• In The New Yorker, Richard Brody on the challenges of doing biography in film (and his list of the best):

  Most directors, like most people, have interesting observations about their daily lives, their communities, their fields of endeavor—and plenty of directors have, as artists, the practical skill to convey such observations. Part of the long-standing collective lament for the demise of the mid-budget dramatic movie—essentially, realistic movies featuring movie stars—is that it’s a form that even middling directors, writers, and actors have always done well. But bio-pics are different, because they are about extraordinary people, and fewer directors, writers, and actors are able to successfully imagine their way into this level of extraordinariness. The genre poses challenges of scope and psychology akin to the stringent visual challenges posed by musicals. Unlike with melodramas or comedies, it takes greatness to advance the art of bio-pics.

• In Unherd, Tom Shone on last year’s “genocide cinema”—Oppenheimer (2023), Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), The Zone of Interest (2023):

  That is the unnerving thrust of all three films, but Glazer’s in particular. By the end of The Zone of Interest, the Höss’s garden wall is more than just a wall. It symbolizes the bureaucratic structures that allowed the Nazis to see themselves as merely “getting on with the job”; or the gas chambers themselves, which Himmler intended to shield German soldiers from the damaging psychological effects of point-blank executions; or the “compartmentalization” that allowed Oppenheimer to divorce the “technical success” of Trinity from its ghastly human effects. Is it any wonder Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest feel more like horror movies than war movies? The absence of victims from both films is not some act of artistic negligence or authorial oversight, but a deliberate absence that haunts both dramas, ionically charging what we do see: technocrats haunted by their own eerie success, numbed by a sense of mission, dogged by miasmic guilt.

  [As long as we’re talking about these I’m going to keep suggesting Pacifiction (2023), which deals with similar material and is better than these three. —Steve]

  • In the Times, on the sound design of Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest:

    To the Höss family, the sound is background noise, and they no longer hear it, the way you stop hearing planes if you grow up near an airport. But a key scene later on suggests that’s not quite the whole story. It’s winter, and the Höss boys are playing in the yard alone. The older brother tricks his younger brother into entering the greenhouse, then locks him in and sits down, smiling, as the boy yells to be let out. The older one starts hissing. He’s playacting the part of a guard, having locked his brother in a gas chamber, and he knows exactly the sound it makes. His parents may have numbed their own ability to feel their humanity, but he has absorbed the massacre in a soul-stunting way.

• In , on Mary Pickford:

  Pickford is an actor of volume. Whereas a silent actor of any talent level must be trained in movements and gestures of exaggeration, there is nothing exaggerated about Pickford. It is all about her size, her weight. Like a peacock flushing its luxurious feathers outward, gaining the superficial mass of a lion, Pickford manages to switch, rather elegantly, from the coquette, a shrinking creature in layers of white satin, to the tramp, a bigger, rowdier character, a different weight class on the screen. She is less comparable to a Chaplin as she is to an iguana. Certain strains of marine iguanas are able to change their length, their size, sometimes even their mass, in order to compensate for a lack of available food, or to ward off predators. We can say Pickford has that same ability—to change her filmic mass, contort and shift her persona into odd new shapes, even change her age—in order to better suit her character or world view. She is an irresistible body, puny enough to fit through any thin opening, large enough to fool any villain. Unlike the meticulous Chaplin, she is haphazard and raw, an object that only moves forward, with seemingly limitless potential energy.

• In Commonweal, Griffin Oleynick interviews Tim Parks about Pasolini:

  Pasolini arrived in the capital as an outcast, thinking that all avenues of a conventional career in culture were closed to him. He’d been canceled, as we’d say now. He had never been to Rome, and it proved immensely stimulating. There, Pasolini discovered the gritty suburbs, where he was forced to live since he had no money. He also discovered the Roman dialect—aggressive, violent, full of earthy humor. And he fell in love with all the young, working-class boys and their chaotic energy, and with the idea that there could be a life outside the bourgeoisie. That formative moment is absolutely crucial for understanding Pasolini: his enemy is the piccola borghesia, small-minded middle-class people whom he attacked—in the press, in his films—for the rest of his life.

• Two in The Guardian: First, Beatrice Loayza on “feminist film”:

  It has reached the point where the term feels cheap. Choose a film, do a bit of rhetorical flexing, some squinting and voilà: a feminist icon! On the one hand, this speaks to the normalization of a term once considered radical and niche—we are all feminists, or should be. On the other hand, the label of “feminist” is beginning to feel more like a subcategory on Netflix—an algorithmic signpost—than a meaningful description of art. And as a subgenre it’s so broad as to be useless—covering biopics about women’s suffragists, raunchy feminist comedies, and final-girl horror screamfests. I don’t go around looking for feminist messaging in the many films I watch, and if I find it, it’s not automatically a positive thing.

Reviews:

• Second, reviews Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004):

  One of the reasons why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, now 20 years old, ranks among the best love stories of the twenty-first century is that it makes the unique argument that failure is an essential, precious part of romantic experience. It’s only human to want that pain to go away, but the film suggests that literally making it so would be a wish on a monkey’s paw, offering some short-term relief, perhaps, but with unanticipated long-term consequences. People usually have many more failed relationships before one that succeeds, after all, and the accumulation of experience and memory not only means something, but that meaning isn’t static. Bitter moments can turn bittersweet.

• In 4Columns, Michelle Orange reviews La Chimera (March 29):

  Less interested in telling a story than casting a spell, La Chimera wears its influences (Pasolini, Fellini, the Taviani brothers) loudly and with pride, not unlike the men who in an early sequence don dresses and rouge to preen and buss their way through the town’s Epiphany parade. Not quite an ensemble piece, the film suffers for its divided focus between the amorphous plight of its central character and the unruly collective he leads. La Chimera finds its own register in scenes where that collective operates as more than background players—notably an evening beach party that leads to the gang’s most lucrative discovery yet. Charm and danger swirl as an oldster belts a few lines at the mic and Italia (Carol Duarte) dances in a sequined halter dress. The men imitate and then surround her, grabbing at her skirt. On the sidelines, Fabiana (Ramona Fiorini), the sole woman in the group, gives Arthur (Josh O’Connor) a look as old as the scene they are watching unfold. Do something, it says. Get her out of there. And, as if called from his private reveries for just a moment, he does.

• In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri reviews Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (March 15):

  Of course, that’s why it works. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983), about forbidden homoerotic longing in a Japanese POW camp, is filled with scenes of terrible cruelty, but beneath so much of the violence lies unfulfilled desire, and Sakamoto’s music opens new emotional doors that the onscreen story merely approaches. As played in Oshima’s film, the central theme is loud, brash, and alien. When played on a solo piano, however—which is how Sakamoto performed it in later years, and how he performs it in Opus—you sense its velvet tenderness, its otherworldly optimism. Reduced to its essence, it’s a love song.

Reviews of books:

• In The New York Sun, Carl Rollyson reviews a biography of Garbo (Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo, by Lois W. Banner, 2023):

  For Ms. Banner, Garbo’s signature role is Queen Christina, a character admired as a feminist heroine whom Garbo resembled in many respects, though the royal personage had a hook nose and was nowhere near the beauty Garbo personified. Not only did both women exhibit an intense interest in art, literature, and religion, the queen of Sweden and the queen of Hollywood each renounced a powerful position—Christina abdicated at 28 and Garbo relinquished movie stardom before she was 40.

  Garbo was severely disappointed that Hollywood did not value her performance in Queen Christina (1933) and did not offer her similar roles, which she did not seek out, concluding (wrongly, Ms. Banner argues) that the film was a failure. Louis B. Mayer doctored the books to make it appear as though Queen Christina lost money. To Ms. Banner, the film is a triumph that makes Garbo’s retreat from adventurous roles all the more regrettable. 

N.B.:

• Vulture’s Second Annual Stunt Awards.

  • “The 100 Fights That Shaped Action Cinema”

• Christopher Walken learns about the connection between Dune and the music video for “Weapon of Choice” (both of which feature Christopher Walken).

• The hunt for Christopher Nolan’s short film Larceny (1996).

• An analysis of characters in movies saying the title of the movie.

• “Ask A Music Critic: Will Timothée Chalamet Be Good At Playing Bob Dylan?” [Not as good as Cate Blanchett. —Steve]

• The collectors of DVDs, preservers of humanity’s audiovisual heritage.

  • The challenges of digital preservation.

  • Martin Scorsese’s VHS collection is at the University of Colorado.

• An appreciation of the Landmark at Bethesda Row.

• M. Emmet Walsh died on Tuesday, March 19. R.I.P.

In theaters:

[Since every WRB Film Supplement is someone’s first: the movies are listed in approximate order of how good I think they are. Steve’s larks are the ones I recommend you see. —Steve]

Steve’s larks:

[None, to my dismay, although in the right mood I might bump the top film from The rest. —Steve]

The rest:

Love Lies Bleeding (dir. Rose Glass, March 15)

Very American is the situation Lou (Kristen Stewart) finds herself in—working a miserable job in a crummy little New Mexico town, waiting for something to happen. Very American, too, is that “something” being a stranger with the possibility of being bad news—in this case Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a bodybuilder passing through on her way to Vegas. This is how film noir works. The real novelty here is not the lesbianism but the steroids Lou gives Jackie, which transform her (literally, through surreal body horror shots of her muscles growing) from a normal-seeing person into someone capable of exceptional violence, exceptional self-loathing, exceptional self-sabotage. Jackie, ’roided out, hardly even tries to clean any of this up; that falls on other people, Lou included. Isn’t that America? Isn’t that love?

Problemista (dir. Julio Torres, March 1)

In the best scene—say “Kafkaesque” if you like—Alejandro (Julio Torres), aspiring toy designer, finds the process of getting a visa to stay in the United States reflected in a dream where he is trapped in an infinite staircase of rooms, climbing through ceiling panels only to make no progress. Nothing else is up to that standard as images or ideas (the immigration narrative fades into a more general “young person trying to make it in New York without money” story), but Tilda Swinton as Elizabeth, the demanding and out there art-world lady Alejandro finds himself working for, forces the film to be about something. It is not about its confused ideas about artists and their work; it is about Elizabeth’s furious desire to be respected and honored. 

Snack Shack (dir. Adam Rehmeier, March 15)

Through long exposure and practice, the suspension of disbelief for most audiences permits people in their mid-20s to play high schoolers in the movies. It does not permit people the age of college students to play middle schoolers—they end up seeming not like middle schoolers but exceptionally immature college students. [I wanted to hate these characters and kept having to remind myself that they were, in fact, thirteen and therefore deserving of slightly more indulgence. —Steve] That said, it’s summer in Nebraska in 1991. There are two guys who are best friends, one wild (Gabriel LaBelle) and one staid (Conor Sherry). There is a girl (Mika Abdalla). There are schemes. Near the end everything gets real heavy. You know the drill. And yet it has charm in abundance, and still has some charm even with the issue of suspension of disbelief.

One Life (dir. James Hawes, March 15)

An elderly Nicholas Winton (Anthony Hopkins), a socialist stockbroker (wonderful combination, allows him to get paid for reading the Financial Times, which he would otherwise read for free) starts going through all his old papers and things. He finds his records from when he as a younger man (Johnny Flynn) helped organize the transport by train of 669 children from Prague to London, mostly Jewish, before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. It’s fine hagiography, and Winton deserves it; but the real strength is Anthony Hopkins portraying a man near the end of his life who knows he did something important and noble, but who is haunted by the thought of the additional children he could have saved if he had only worked more, pushed harder, done things differently. It is impossible to imagine that such a feeling ever completely went away for a man like Winton, but as the film ends the afterlife of his records helps him find a kind of peace.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (dir. Adam Wingard, March 29)

The big monsters fight. That’s all you can ask for. Like the rest of the series it feels like it was put together by someone who deeply considered Heidegger’s Der Spiegel interview and The Question Concerning Technology (especially “only a god can save us” and his gloss of the opening of Hölderlin’s “Patmos”) before being repeatedly hit over the head. This adds another level of interest for those who cannot be entertained solely by big monsters fighting. It is also revealed in this installment that, in the beginning, all things were in harmony. Then, an ape decided to rebel against this established order and, with the aid of other apes he convinced to join him, waged war against it. The rebel apes were finally defeated by Godzilla, who banished them to a desolate and fiery waste. For more information about these events, consult Paradise Lost.

[For more on Kong see Movies across the decades below. —Steve]

Immaculate (dir. Michael Mohan, March 22)

An American nun (Sydney Sweeney) goes to an Italian convent and gets more than she bargained for. Most of this comes from the lurid imagination of a twenty-first-century secularist, but its suggestion that Americans are too naïve to understand the dark maneuvering subtleties of Europe comes from Henry James, and its belief that the Italian language is itself a source of evil comes from the lurid imagination of a nineteenth-century Protestant.

Knox Goes Away (dir. Michael Keaton, March 15)

One of the better recent old guy action movies. Better than Liam Neeson’s recent work (about one example of which more lower down); worse than The Equalizer 3 (2023) because Denzel Washington is in that one. Surely Michael Keaton has better things to be doing than acting in this kind of thing; surely he is a more interesting person than his competent and uninteresting direction would suggest. Al Pacino steals every scene he is in, except when his leopard-print clothing steals them from him.

The American Society of Magical Negroes (dir. Kobi Libii, March 15)

The most provocative thing about it is the title. The funniest, which the film wisely returns to over and over, is its sending up of the general white attitude that black people are the repositories and guardians of an ineffable “cool,” which they bestow on white people they deem worthy. But this is hardly new—when jazz was invented in New Orleans a white man no doubt appeared instantly to take a racialized interest in the music—and it adds little to that conversation. Also there is a romance, which would be honey on the cup if the cup had anything bitter in it.

In the Land of Saints and Sinners (dir. Robert Lorenz, March 29)

Probably the best of Liam Neeson’s recent work, if only because Marlowe (2023) and Retribution (2023) were basically unwatchable and this one has Kerry Condon, who is always watchable, in it. It makes sense that in a film where all the actors are Irish (some from the Republic of Ireland, some from Northern Ireland) the IRA are not the heroes; it is darkly funny that, in order to prevent a certain kind of American from getting confused, the incident that sets off the film’s action is one of the IRA members abusing a child.

Kung Fu Panda 4 (dir. Mike Mitchell, March 8)

[What do you want me to say about “Kung Fu Panda 4” here? Awkwafina is fine. This exhausts my positivity. —Steve]

YOLO (dir. Jia Ling, March 8)

A Chinese ripoff of Rocky (1976) that adds a subplot about weight loss. They might have the moves down, but they don’t have the magic. They also don’t have the music, so they have to use “Gonna Fly Now.” On the other hand, a boxing movie that isn’t part of an existing franchise can make $400 million at the Chinese box office, so who really should be laughing?

Cabrini (dir. Alejandro Gómez Monteverde, March 8)

In this film a prostitute (Romana Maggiora Vergano) expresses to Mother Cabrini (Cristiana Dell’Anna) her fear that her sins are so great that she can never be clean. Cabrini, who historically was a religious sister but here acts like some combination of a modern non-denominational Evangelical and a modern “lean in” type, responds not by referencing any of the several applicable passages from the Gospels but by saying that the prostitute is a strong woman.

Arthur the King (dir. Simon Cellan Jones, March 15)

[To any studio executives reading this fine newsletter: Are you worried that the only way to get audiences suffering from superhero fatigue to enjoy your product is the long and arduous work of making movies that are good? Fear not! If the reaction of the audience I saw this with is any indication, your salvation lies in making movies that are as terrible as ever, as long as they exploit Americans’ shameless sentimentality about dogs! Rejoice! Your troubles are at an end! —Steve]

Critical notes:

• Corey Atad on the unreality of CGI:

  It’s ultimately a philosophical question, and one which reveals a truth that might be uncomfortable for VFX artists like Ussing, whose role in the filmmaking process has become increasingly central. As he points out, on blockbuster movies, the VFX department is often the largest single department by orders of magnitude. Many in the VFX community complain that crappy CGI—often the result of studios like Marvel failing to plan productions effectively, putting too much pressure and not giving close to enough time in post-production—has led to a negative impression among the public regarding the use of digital effects. If only the public knew about all the invisible CGI they’ve simply never noticed, maybe then they would appreciate the sizable contribution of VFX artists. But what if it’s not just the bad CGI? Perhaps the good CGI—the invisible CGI—is part of the problem, too. Perhaps audiences are reacting to the feeling that we’ve lost something amid cinema’s digital revolution, even when we can’t properly articulate what that is. Perhaps that’s the “why.”

Movies across the decades:

King Kong (dir. Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

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Links:

• In The New Atlantis, Rachel Altman on aging in Barbie (2023):

  As she absorbs more, though, Barbie (Margot Robbie) also discovers the blessings of life. For the first time, she bears witness to childhood, motherhood, and the weightiness of adult relationships. In one of the most touching scenes of the film, Barbie sits at a bus stop and notices the transcendent beauty of an old woman (Ann Roth). “You’re so beautiful,” Barbie tells her. “I know it,” the woman replies. In Barbieland, everyone is young, and youth, to be sure, is one kind of beauty. But this woman’s peaceful contentment with the wrinkles earned from a life well lived is another. Barbie realizes that there’s something scarier than cellulite: never moving forward in life’s stages.

• In RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz reappreciates the Star Wars prequels:

  I’m also fascinated by how the prequels mirror the first three movies so exactly in terms of major events that if you watch the six-film cycle in order and treat it as a complete statement, it starts to look like a meditation on free will versus predestination. Among other repeated events, there’s a forced landing on Tatooine, the death of a mentor at the hands of a Sith, a chase through an asteroid belt, and, in the second installment, a sudden twist that changes your relationship to the hero, followed by a cliffhanger. The droids show up again, becoming immortal tin-can Shakespearean jester-witnesses to the Skywalker saga, and putting a self-aware storytelling frame around Lucas' narrative embellishments and recontextualizations. C-3PO isn’t aware that a lot of things have happened to him before because his memory gets erased, but his buddy R2-D2 apparently knows but never says anything, and keeps revealing new powers (including the ability to fly!) that would have come in handy in other films had he felt like using them.

• In The New Yorker, on sexual desire and body horror in the films of David Cronenberg:

  The flesh! It just makes you crazy! It just disassembles you and puts you back together in a different form! Brundlefly (Jeff Goldblum) is disfigured and ultimately destroyed, yet I suspect that many of us would rather turn into something other, even something awful, than stay siloed in the solitary and workaday self. “The disease . . . wants to turn me into something else—that’s not too terrible, is it?” Brundle, already halfway to Brundlefly, muses with characteristically Cronenbergian flair. “Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.”

  [Finally a serious treatment of the classic locus philosophicus, “Would you still love me if I were a worm?” —Chris]

• In The Baffler, Robert Rubsam on cooking on screen in The Taste of Things (2024) and elsewhere:

  As a third-act tragedy reveals, this fantasy is also an elegy. The characters reference huge new hotels, presided over by master chefs, and are invited to a gut-bustingly incoherent meal by an indulgent prince, gesturing toward the degradation and commercialization of their passion. The art of the gourmand is centered on the menu, which strives for balance between the flavors, delivers dishes in the proper order, and respects the point-counterpoint of sweet and savory. It’s an elite view, but it rests on a foundation of deep knowledge and dignified labor, and respects both the chef’s palate and the cook’s intuitions. A mass society prizes volume, speed, and interchangeability: cheap meals delivered with the efficiency of an assembly line. In Siegfried Kracauer’s phrase, it obeys “the ideal of the machine.” Dodin’s (Benoît Magimel) estate will soon become an anachronism, if it has not already.

  [One of the pitfalls of being known for cooking quite a lot is that people assume I am interested in cooking-themed things. I am not! I cannot explain this. I do want to go see The Taste of Things, though. —Chris]

• In our sister publication in New Amsterdam, Dennis Zhou on the history of Taiwan as seen by Edward Yang:

  In Taipei—a city that has been transformed from indigenous settlement to Qing outpost, Japanese model colony, provisional capital, and finally hypermodern global metropolis—the effects of history show themselves readily yet also hide beneath the surface. Yang’s characters often sit in the backs of taxis or drive themselves around the city, where they might occasionally pass Chiang’s gleaming visage or a remnant of the city’s Qing-era walls, razed by the Japanese to make way for Haussmann-derived boulevards. So many of Taipei’s buildings look alike because they were built in a hurry, between the 1970s and 1990s, when the Nationalists tacitly abandoned their plan to retake the mainland and made Taiwan their permanent home, culminating in the demolition of the shantytowns and soldiers’ villages set up as impromptu residences and their replacement with high-rises. The city has stood ever since as both a repository for nostalgia and a monument to forgetting.

• In 4Columns, Beatrice Loayza on Luis Buñuel’s career in Mexico:

  The greatest portraits of cuckoldry present the masculine fear of betrayal as an absurd kind of pathology—and no film, in my mind, achieves this as magnificently as 1953’s Él (This Strange Passion). Francisco (Arturo de Córdova) is consumed by the kind of amour fou that knows no laws, has no barriers; possessing his beautiful wife, Gloria (Delia Garcés), is his only happiness, a sick, destructive pleasure that succeeds only in deranging him further. Beyond Francisco’s bizarre antics, the melodrama achieves a deep shade of black humor for the patriarchal social conditions it lays bare: as with Eduardo’s kid sister in Abismos de pasíon (1954), no one seems to take Gloria’s cries for help all that seriously. This nonchalance has little to do with not believing women (strapping machos are perhaps too willing to defend the honor of the so-called weaker sex, so much so that their “heroics” come off as performative and/or infantilizing, as seen in The Brute, from 1953, and The Young One, from 1960). Gloria is believed, all right, but her friends and family members shrug it off all the same: that’s marriage, and you’re stuck in it for life.

  [I’ve spent a lot of time trying to track down a copy of Buñuel’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights. I have a long list of complaints with every adaptation I’ve seen—they all do something I would describe as either “flinching” or “drawing on the popular conception of Wuthering Heights and not the text”—and I suspect Buñuel’s might not. If you know where I can find it, please let me know. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw reviews Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024):

  As he takes us through the great Powell/Pressburger films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Scorsese also plays clips of his own films, including Raging Bull (1980) and The Age of Innocence (1993), showing how he had been influenced by these predecessors. How remarkable that a movie director who came of age in the era of gritty violent realism—precisely that movement which supplanted the romantic idealism of Powell and Pressburger—was to give them a second lease of life.

  [The Red Shoes was the subject of Steve’s first Movies across the decades feature in last February’s Film Supplement. —Chris]

• In , reviews May December (2023):

  As such, May December stages the search for meaning as the correlate of the production of imitation: they are the same thing. The “truth” Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) looks for is not truth in some historical sense but a truth that will enable her to create a convincing performance. The narrative impulse (to make legible human time) and its reduction to an object of consumption cannot be delineated. What we experience as a result is the uncanny nature of a commercial genre’s efforts to inscribe such events within a narrow horizon of moral pathos and superficial libidinal economies.

• In The Nation, A. S. Hamrah reviews About Dry Grasses (2024):

  Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), we come to understand, exists in the ultimate condition of the Ceylan protagonist: He longs to be in Istanbul instead of living on the edge of nowhere, and his pining for the city is coupled with an unwillingness to commit to or even recognize anything that might help him get there. 

  But as we watch About Dry Grasses, we realize that the film’s running time also opens it up in many other ways. In fact, its length allows Ceylan to keep changing the stakes. As Samet continues doing the wrong thing, Ceylan deepens the film’s politics, subtly placing his story in the context of suicide bombings and Kurdish resistance, a world in which Samet’s complaints about his lot in life are trivial and petty. 

Reviews of books [Hey now, let’s stay in our lanes. —Chris]:

• In The Baffler, K. F. Watanabe reviews the first English translation of the original Godzilla novellas (Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, by Shigeru Kayama, 1955, translated by Jeffrey Angels, 2023):

  After his Godzilla novellas were published, Kayama decided to bow out. In a published essay translated as “Godzilla Confessions,” he expresses some misgivings about the direction of the franchise, realizing it was moving away from his original intentions. Angles summarizes Kayama’s dilemma as the author presciently described it: “What had started as a symbol representing his fear of atomic weapons had morphed into a character with a ‘manga-like’ appeal that the viewing audience loved.” In Kayama’s thinking, contributing to Godzilla’s continued existence represented tacit approval of the hydrogen bomb. Still, he had to admit, he too started to feel affectionately toward his creation.

N.B.:

• A restoration of the 7-hour cut of Napoléon (1927) screened at the Apollo Theatre during its initial release will premiere in Paris this July. [I’ve seen the Kevin Brownlow restoration from 2004 (about which, see the Dec. 2023 Film Supplement), which lasts five and a half hours; awe-inspiring. Considering a trip to Paris in the style of Frances Ha (2012) to see this. —Steve] [If you can find flights cheap enough we can look at the WRB budget for this. —Chris]

• The costume designer for Dune: Part Two (2024) breaks down her inspirations.

• “22 Things I Did With the ‘Dune 2’ Popcorn Bucket”

  • Other weird movie merch.

• “I Saw ‘Dune 2’ at 3:15 a.m.: Inside the Nearly Sold-Out, All-Night Screening in 70mm IMAX”

• Denis Villeneuve: “When I'm thinking about the Fremen, I'm thinking about French Canadians.” [In Quebec, we need to cultivate hydropower. —Steve]

• An interview with Will Gluck, director of Anyone But You (2023), about its success.

• All the food in The Taste of Things was real.

• Juliette Binoche: “I think we should all make films with every single boyfriend we’ve separated from.” [Very WRB-coded. —Steve] [No comment. —Chris]

• Sneaking around to see Woody Allen’s latest. [I’m not going to pretend I don’t want to see it. —Chris]

• A story of getting banned from a theater when a smuggled-in three-liter bottle of off-brand Mountain Dew exploded.

• Universal released some PVOD revenue numbers.

• In praise of the 4K Blu-ray. [I’m all in. I want it on the shelf. I hope 4K discs become more common and cheaper, it seemed like for a while we were at the end of the entire medium. —Chris]

• David Bordwell, film scholar, died on Thursday, February 29. R.I.P.

In theaters:

[Since every WRB Film Supplement is someone’s first: the movies are listed in approximate order of how good I think they are. Steve’s larks are the ones I recommend you see. —Steve]

Steve’s larks:

The Taste of Things (dir. Tran Anh Hung, February 9)

[The best new release I’ve seen since TÁR (2022). —Steve]

Tradition is love. The experience of a tradition is indivisible from love for those from whom it was learned, with whom it is shared, and to whom it is passed on. Dodin (Benoît Magimel), the so-called “Napoleon of gastronomy,” and his cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) have been engaged in their work together—he helps out in the kitchen—for decades. She is his lover but always refuses his proposals of marriage; she wants love as they experience it while working together on food, with him devising new dishes and her making them come to life. There, she is his equal; if anything, she is his superior. And their friends, fellow gourmands, with whom Dodin eats all recognize it. They want her to eat with them, but she declines and Dodin recognizes his inability to order her. And Dodin’s scheme to propose marriage in a way that she’ll accept requires him to inhabit the whole of the culinary tradition, even the portions of it she has always occupied.

Near the end of the film, Dodin says to Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), the young woman he is training as his protégé, that she is too young to appreciate bone marrow, but she must remember the taste for when she can. The tradition Dodin and Eugénie have devoted their lives to is enriched by their contributions, and enriched further by their willingness to share those contributions with those around them and the next generation, even if they will not see the full impact of their work. Dodin says of a soup at one point that it must all have one flavor, and yet each part of it must remain distinct. He might as well be describing tradition, which would go on without him and Eugénie but benefits from their work. And to Dodin’s friends and Pauline they themselves are at the center of the rich heritage they pass on.

Dune: Part Two (dir. Denis Villeneuve, March 1)

Those who enjoyed the first installment will enjoy this. It feels epic because it looks epic and shames the rest of big-budget Hollywood in so doing. The first ride Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) takes on a sandworm is breathtaking.

[The feelings of the native people towards their savior from outside, and how Lawrence of Arabia (1962) handles that subject, are the topic of this month’s Movies across the decades below. —Steve]

The rest:

The Monk and the Gun (dir. Pawo Choyning Dorji, February 9)

One of the great delights of cinema from outside the United States is the appearance of an American who has no understanding of manners, nuance, or the place where he is. [Chris and I discussed one of the greatest in this category—Jeremy Prokosch in Contempt (1963)—in the Jan. 2024 Film Supplement. —Steve] This particular American, an arms dealer (Harry Einhorn) who has come to Bhutan to buy a rare Civil War-era rifle, is unable to understand what a lama wants with the gun in question and why one of his monks (Tandin Wangchuk) refuses to sell it. The Bhutanese villagers he’s dealing with understand him slightly better; after all, they’ve seen a James Bond film. And the villagers are grappling with Bhutan’s democratic transition so that their country can be like the United States. In the end, it all gets sorted out and everyone’s happy. Except for the American.

Io Capitano (dir. Matteo Garrone, February 23)

There are three separate ideas that piece together this film. The first is flat depiction of migration from West Africa through the Sahara and the Mediterranean to Europe. It does not shy away from its brutality—there are robberies, there are deaths in the desert, there is torture—but the other pieces take the edges off. The second is a coming-of-age narrative about Seydou (Seydou Sarr, with such subtlety that you’d never guess this was his debut), who undertakes the journey with his cousin (Moustapha Fall) and (obviously) grows up a lot during it. The last, which appears only in Seydou’s dreams and hallucinations, is textbook magical realism. It should, perhaps, have been the whole film, since the material is suited for it; as it is, it’s one more way the film can’t decide whether and how it wants to soften its presentation for an audience.

Land of Bad (dir. William Eubank, February 16)

The current stage of Russell Crowe’s career, where he appears to select roles based on how much scenery-chewing they let him do, continues to be a lot of fun. This time, he’s a hot-tempered drone operator. Many other things happen in this film, which is inconvenient, since they take the focus off Russell Crowe, hot-tempered drone operator.

Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders, February 7)

Pure Boomer dreaming. Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) is how Boomers perceive themselves; he lives a simple life, he does his job as a cleaner of Tokyo’s public toilets, he has his routine of music and books and attention to nature. There is a tender melancholy to it. The portions where young people he meets hear the likes of Patti Smith and Lou Reed for the first time on Hirayama’s cassette tapes are the equivalent of that YouTube genre “teens react to old people stuff with awe and wonder” and give away the game.

Ordinary Angels (dir. Jon Gunn, February 23)

You would not expect a faith-based film to be the most stereotypical “Movie for Adults”—nothing too out there, nothing foreign, nothing flashy, just a solid drama—on this list, but it is. One benefit of making a Movie for Adults is being able to get Hilary Swank to star in it. Her role, too, is for adults; she plays a hairdresser who, in an attempt to make up for the harm her alcoholism has caused, throws herself into helping a family hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt due to one daughter’s liver disease. Swank is one of the great actresses of the last couple decades; the charisma on display in one scene where she dances on a bar is not something most can match, and that charisma carries what would otherwise be an unmemorable drama.

Drive-Away Dolls (dir. Ethan Coen, February 23)

If this and The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) prove anything, they prove that Joel was responsible for the existential bleakness and Ethan was responsible for the jokes within their collaborations; they also prove that Joel has most of the talent. This might as well be a lame imitation of better Coen films by a young filmmaker. Ethan Coen, apparently, believes that bad PowerPoint transitions are art and that influences should be honored by direct reference. Astounding. Here, the references, many of which are to his past work, only pose the question “why are Fargo (1996) and Burn After Reading (2008) and A Serious Man (2009) so much better than this?” (It’s set in 1999, a choice which ends up being one more way it feels like better Coen films.) And the film’s attitude towards its central lesbian couple (Margaret Qualley, doing some terrible accent work, and Geraldine Viswanathan) and lesbianism in general is leering and gross, aimed at titillation and little else.

Lisa Frankenstein (dir. Zelda Williams, February 9)

Like Drive-Away Dolls it’s a period piece, but for the ’80s. Like Drive-Away Dolls it is deeply and obviously indebted to several better films, most importantly Heathers (1988). Like Drive-Away Dolls it is incredibly confused about what it wants to say. Like Drive-Away Dolls it relies on jokes to hold it together. The jokes in Drive-Away Dolls are better, though.

Joshua: Imai Pol Kaakha (dir. Gautham Vasudev Menon, March 1)

Tamil cinema keeps the comedy of remarriage alive here with a premise—a hitman (Varun) gets out of the game when he starts a relationship with a prosecutor (Raahei), but she rejects him when she learns about his job; later he becomes a bodyguard assigned to protect her—more interesting than it appears on screen. The film ends with the woman shooting and killing her father. What that means is left as an exercise for the reader.

Kiss the Future (dir. Nenad Cicin-Sain, February 23)

Somewhere in here is a good documentary about the music scene in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. That documentary is buried under Bono’s preening self-regard. At one point he says that U2 stopped using satellite footage from Sarajevo during their shows because people started saying that it was cheap and exploitative. He has learned nothing.

Bob Marley: One Love (dir. Reinaldo Marcus Green, February 14)

Another case of “family-approved” meaning “uninteresting.” In its attempt to get away from music biopic cliches it becomes an aimless hangout movie that goes nowhere. While it hangs out with Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) and his friends making Exodus (1977) several more interesting things about Marley’s life—Rastafari, the political situation in Jamaica, his womanizing, his role in the development of Jamaican music—are merely gestured at.

Critical notes:

• Thomas Doherty on the rise and fall of Paramount Pictures:

  Lubitsch’s eponymous touch was already his auteurist billing when he came from Germany to Hollywood in 1922—brought over by Pickford, to supervise her persona shift as a Spanish street singer in Rosita (1923)—but he imprinted his “saucy but not salacious brand of screen satire” at Paramount. In Lubitsch’s hands, the potentially censor-enraging Design for Living (1932)—about a ménage á trois—could be utterly disarming with a practical solution for an age-old problem: A girl like Miriam Hopkins shouldn’t really be forced to choose between Gary Cooper and Fredric March, should she? Such was Paramount’s reputation for “smart and sophisticated” screen fare that studio publicity had to pull back for fear of scaring away the rubes. “Don’t misunderstand the word ‘smart,’” the pressbook for Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932) assured exhibitors. The film was “not over the heads of the mob—and not a picture for the intelligentsia only.”

• on fascism and cinema:

  This is why filmmakers, honest ones at least, get nervous around fascism: what they do is not that different from what the dictator does. Turning images into meanings and meanings into images; conjuring unities. There’s something dangerous about the visual, the power of sight. Domination is always implied. Usually, the seeing eye that roves the world is sovereign over what it surveys; in Renaissance art, God is a disembodied eye, floating by itself in the corner of the scene. But park thousands of eyes in front of some spectacular image, and all that power vanishes. Now the eye is just an intermediary, hooked up to your camera. Great masses of people look at the world exclusively through your little mechanical hole.

Movies across the decades:

Lawrence of Arabia (dir. David Lean, 1962), Dune (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2021), Dune: Part Two (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2024)

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