Of course, the Washington Review of Books will cost you some effort . . . a little sweat and . . . perhaps . . . a little blood.
[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]
- , making the same point a bit differently:
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)
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