WRB—May 2024 Film Supplement
Hey, man, you don’t talk to the Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books. You listen to them. They’ve enlarged my mind. They’re poet warriors in the classic sense.
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)
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