WRB—May 2025 Film Supplement

“What excellent boiled potatoes.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

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

  James Crane
  ):

  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)