WRB—Nov. 2025 Film Supplement

“Boy, if life were only like this.”

Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books right here.

Links:

• In Harper’s, Joy Williams on the death of Gene Hackman:

  In the great movie Unforgiven (1992), Gene’s Little Bill Daggett, about to be executed by Clint Eastwood’s Will Munny, says, “I don’t deserve this . . . to die like this,” and Munny replies, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Which means what exactly? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a good line.

  There were no good lines at the end here, just a long stillness, nights and days of it. Devotion had found her limits, been slain by her limits. Love had hit her wall. Adult death is always strangely humiliating but this was something more, conceptually distressing, theoretically immoderate, elaborately unkind. Man, woman, dog—their illusory life was over.

  It’s just the darndest thing.

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Katy Holland on Hollywood’s idea of the classical world:

  Classical architecture can be found not only in Malibu, but scattered throughout LA. Houses with great white columns resembling ancient temples have long served as America’s architectural shorthand for status and pedigree. Cher Horowitz’ mansion in 1995’s Clueless, and Jeff Bezos’ $165 million estate in LA both represent the use of the neoclassical style as a way for those to visually communicate their power and wealth in the city. Similarly, the Disney headquarters is overlooked by a Greek-style Temple, complete with 19-foot-high columns in the shape of the Seven Dwarfs. Here, in the most kitsch way possible, the classical style is used to attest to the imagination and power of the Disney brand. Repeatedly, then, we see classical architecture being appropriated by LA to help to make expressions about the city and its inhabitants.

  Not only on the land but also on the screen, we find an attempt to use antiquity to shape American identity. The appeal of Rome for Hollywood is obvious; it lends itself naturally to narratives of decadence, sex, sprawling battle scenes, and impossibly beautiful bodies. This obsession with the perfect physique is something LA has directly inherited from antiquity. Just as the Greeks were obsessed with obtaining the beautiful body and gym culture, modern LA also pursues the perfected body in its studios and gyms. Sword-and-sandal epics absorbed this fixation with gleaming torsos.

  [One of the buildings I think about most is the Oneida County Court House in Rome (of course), New York, which would be an unremarkable brick building if not for the incongruous Ionic columns, pediments, and dome. Rome, New York is incredible at this kind of thing; there’s a monument to its veterans with the inscription “In loving memory of all Romans who served our country in the cause of freedom.” “Our country”? Which country? Well. And no doubt somebody somewhere has written on the idea of Rome left behind out East being that of the Republic—out in California, it’s something else. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Thames,

  Leo Robson
  on going to the movies a lot:

  Truffaut said that for a long time he had overlooked “the neurotic aspect of my love for cinema.” If I also did this, it was probably because of the lack of overt neuroses in my everyday existence but especially around filmgoing, the lack of pedantry I brought to the act itself—being unbothered, for example, by the fire-exit sign or by people drinking Pepsi. I preferred to get to things on the opening weekend, but I didn’t really care. Truffaut was talking about subtler signs, the fears or forms of mess that filmgoing sublimates or tidies away. He noted that in his day the “most cinephilic cinephiles” tended to like happy endings, stories of heroes and villains. The French filmmaker and critic Jean Epstein compared going to a movie to entering a state of hypnosis, an aesthetic experience that “modifies the nervous system” much more than reading does. And it would be perverse to deny that watching the dead speak or past actions embalmed in an eternal present tense plays some role in what we find comforting about movies.

Reviews:

• In The Bulwark,

  Bill Ryan
  reviews Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees (1975) and The Appointment (1982):

  Going into this film, knowing only what I’ve just told you, you might assume that the horror of the story stems from a character driven to madness by the cherry blossoms. But somehow, no. Heinous acts are committed by our two lead characters while they are well outside the influence of those trees. Our lead, the otherwise unnamed Mountain Man (Tomisaburô Wakayama), is introduced as he marauds through the mountains, attacking and unhesitatingly, remorselessly murdering innocent travelers. When he murders the servants and husband of our co-lead, a beautiful woman (Shima Iwashita), a romance of sorts is born. Quite unconcerned by the violent death of her husband, the woman is drawn to the Mountain Man’s rough, primitive masculinity, and agrees to become his wife. Then, he takes his new bride to his shambles of a home in the mountains, where his many other wives—clearly kidnap victims, like this new beautiful woman—await him. The Mountain Man, noticing a potential awkward moment, insists they are his ex-wives, but the bride orders her husband to kill them all. And so for the next few minutes, quite a ways away from the cherry trees, the dangers of which the Mountain Man has already explained to his new bride, we watch him, panic-stricken but driven insane by lust like a James M. Cain character, running around and slaying his many wives, who attempt to flee in terror. All of them are killed but one, a childlike young woman (Hiroko Isayama), whom the new bride—who needless to say has been delighted by all of this—says can live and be her servant. And so it is.

  [Something like Bluebeard through a funhouse mirror. —Steve]

Reviews of books:

• In Harper’s, Nick Pinkerton reviews Abel Ferrara’s memoir (Scene: A Memoir, October)

  It should be uncontroversial to assert that excessive use of drink and drug by an artist, when it doesn’t send the indulger hurtling into an early grave, can and often does result in a diminution of said artist’s creative instincts over time. Somewhat more contentious is the matter of whether the tipple, the dose, or what have you can play any fruitful role in the creative process. My own opinion is: of course it can . . . up until the time, that is, when it doesn’t. (To take but one example: in Dan Nadel’s recent biography of Robert Crumb, the subject quite emphatically credits his first experiences with LSD, which occurred when he was churning out card designs at Cleveland’s American Greetings, as a crucial aspect of his artistic development.) The fact of the matter is that if teetotalism were invariably the handmaiden of expressive excellence, and the road of excess never ever wended its way in the direction of the palace of wisdom, we as a species would have figured out as much by now. Once, when discussing Bad Lieutenant (1990), a film by turns morbidly funny and very moving in its depiction of snowballing bad behavior, Ferrara stated that the director of such a film “needed to be using; the director and the writer—not the actors.” (The writer, in this case, was his co-screenwriter Zoë Lund, who died in 1999 at age thirty-seven.) Reading Scene, I wondered whether Ferrara would say the same thing today and, if so, whether he believes that the toll taken by putting himself in a headspace where he could understand and communicate the hanging-by-a-thread desperation of Harvey Keitel’s degenerate drug-sponge lieutenant was worth the film that resulted from it. I tend to think so, but that’s easy to say when it’s somebody else who’s suffering the nausea and morning shakes.

  [Bad Lieutenant feels like both a cheap parody of Scorsese and one of the more imaginative films about Catholicism ever made at basically every moment. That over-invoked Flannery O’Connor quote applies more to Bad Lieutenant than to any of her own work:

  When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

  —Steve]

• In Commonweal,

  Steve Knepper
  reviews a book about the assumptions behind horror films (Theology of Horror: The Hidden Depths of Popular Films, by Ryan G. Duns, 2024):

  The second major concern of Duns’ study is how horror can make our usual reality uncanny. Horror can startle or scare us into perplexed wonder at the nature of existence. Again and again in horror films, some sinister entity “disrupts and threatens” everyday existence. Duns uses the term metataxis to describe this dynamic: “The metataxis of horror involves, consequently, an incursion into the world that precipitates a breakdown of the dominant order, leaving it to the characters to recognize and respond to this shattering . . . before it is too late.” As in the film Insidious (2010), this might be the small world of a new home into which a family moves with high hopes, only to discover that the house is decidedly un-homey, that it has a troubled past and is a portal to evil. In A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the whole neighborhood turns out to have a troubled past, but at a more basic and intimate level, the world that gets disrupted in the film is the sleep of the neighborhood’s children, as Freddy Krueger manifests a power to inflict physical violence on them through their dreams. At times, the metataxis threatens to disrupt the whole world as we know it. This is the case with the vampire virus that infects most of humanity in I Am Legend (2007).

  [Sometimes in horror this happens in the other direction; think of Howie (Edward Woodward) in The Wicker Man (1973) telling Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) that when the crops fail again next year the islanders will turn on him. —Steve]

• In our sister publication in Tinseltown, Oliver Evans reviews a book about Ed Wood (Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA, by Will Sloan, October):

  There is a symmetry to Sloan’s approach given that “la politique des auteurs” was partly developed as a way for the French Cahiers du cinéma critics to justify their love of American commercial junk. The Cahiers auteurists saw cinema as an art rather than an industrial product primarily shaped by producers, arguing that Hollywood directors like Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock were the authors of their films, infusing them with a distinct and visible set of preoccupations. But what began as a way to recover artistic merit from a commercial process has since become a tautology. Today, the mere invocation of a name—practically any name will do—has become evidence of artistic merit. The marketing departments of major studios now regularly publicize even their dullest hacks as “visionary minds” (a label I have seen attached to such era-defining artists as Gore Verbinski and Alex Proyas). The 2010s saw a further mutation of the idea when a movement of (extremely online) cinephiles coined the term “vulgar auteurism” to promote the perceived stylistic accomplishments of directors such as Michael Bay (director of Paramount Pictures’ first five Transformers films), Justin Lin (director of several entries in Universal Pictures’ Fast & Furious franchise), and Roland Emmerich, a man who thinks you can outrun the freezing point (see his 2004 eco-disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, in which some characters are “chased” by a wave of subzero air). The internet’s decentralization of taste and its democratic promotion of cineliteracy are beautiful things, but there is nothing democratic about the spiritually ugly products of American cultural imperialism. “Distinctive” is a fine measure of artistry, so long as we remember to include “distinctively banal,” “distinctively crass,” and “distinctively cruel.”

  [“Visionary” is a great word. What are the visions, exactly? Who can say. “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see Transformers films.” —Steve]

N.B.:

• An interview with Anthony Hopkins.

• How to pronounce “biopic.”

• Diane Keaton died on Saturday, October 11. R.I.P.

  • In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis:

    Keaton’s emotional openness, her readability, is critical to The Godfather (1972) because of what Kay and Michael mean to each other and how their relationship speaks to the shadowy whole. The film is the story of a family and a criminal syndicate, but it is also a tragedy about a marriage, its secrets and lies. Kay’s love for Michael, her innocence and sweetness, help make him an immediately sympathetic presence, while the hurt that later clouds her eyes foreshadows Michael’s betrayal of her and his dramatically shifting role from the family’s baby boy to its patriarch. From the start, Kay is a mirror for the viewers, who are also similarly seduced by Michael, as well as fascinated, repelled and helplessly hooked on him.

  • In The New Yorker, Hilton Als:

    And while Diane Keaton, who died on October 11th, at the age of seventy-nine, will be remembered for the charm of her attitude toward comedy—How did I, a nice-enough girl from Santa Ana, end up here? Why, and how, am I doing this?—it’s the essential goodness that characterizes all her work, the sunshine that breaks through the fog of confusion, that will stay with us most powerfully. We loved her for her ambivalence about performing, how she wanted to be seen even as she ran from it, hiding her face under the brim of a hat, or behind tinted glasses, or in the arms of one of her onscreen lovers. It was the nuance of that ambivalence that kept us in our seats, and sometimes on the edge of them, because we’d all been there when it came to love or power: Is this mine to have and to hold? Or should I give it back? Keaton wasn’t a greedy star, anxious for the spotlight, like Bette Davis, or luscious and silent, like Isabelle Adjani, or as firmly rooted in the earth as Diana Sands. She stood apart from her own stardom, even as she desired recognition, and so successful was Keaton’s deflection of her “I” that we hardly noticed that her career lasted as long as those of her most successful male contemporaries—Pacino, De Niro, and so on—something very rare for a female star in Hollywood.

  • In The Ringer, Brian Phillips:

    Outside in the autumn air, though, I wasn’t thinking about movies much. I was thinking I loved the way she was simultaneously the coolest person in Hollywood and also the person least aware of what anyone else thought was cool. Whatever she did, she didn’t do it to get noticed, or to get likes, or for clout. She did it, or so it seemed from a distance, because she wanted to do it. Katharine Hepburn, one of Keaton’s original influences, said of Humphrey Bogart that he liked to sail his boat, so he sailed his boat, and he liked to drink, so he drank. Keaton liked to wear men’s neckties, so she wore men’s neckties. She liked to live with her mom, so she lived with her mom. She liked to walk her dog, so she walked her dog. And that was how she went through life.

Movies across the decades:

Annie Hall (dir. Woody Allen, 1977)