WRB—Aug. 2025 Film Supplement

“clever enough at gaining a fortune”

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)