Film Freak Central

Gemini Man (2019)

**/****
starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong
screenplay by David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw Many stories are like this, about how heroes reach an age where a younger doppelgänger shows up on the scene to establish their reputation at the expense of the old Alpha. As hairless primates fond of the Oedipus story, we're attracted to this tale of the son becoming the father. When a phantom Marlon Brando frames Superman Returns thusly in that film's prologue, it's stated so magisterially it rings with the heft of cathedral bells. What Ang Lee's Gemini Man presupposes is: what if the young gunslinger looking to make his mark is a literal clone of the old gunslinger? It's kind of an intriguing idea, if you think that cloning someone from DNA and a surrogate uterus will result in shared skills and memories--like those stories about identical twins marrying women with the same name and knowing when the other is in danger or some shit. It's considerably less intriguing when its premise relies on this but, knowing that's stupid, then tries to shoehorn in a ton of exposition and backstory to explain what should probably have been left unexplained. At the mid-point of Gemini Man, when what millions of dollars of advertising have already spoiled needs to be explained, it's poor spook Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) left to mouth the "you just need an egg!" explanation. Better if said explanation were that they'd figured out some way to clone someone and then implant the training. Oh, never mind.

TIFF 2019: Waves

**½/****
starring Kelvin Harrison Jr, Lucas Hedges, Taylor Russell, Sterling K. Brown
written and directed by Trey Edward Shults

by Walter Chaw The first thing I'd say about Trey Edward Shults's Waves is that I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that this is his story to tell. The tale of the devastation wrought upon a black family by internal and external social pressures is at once obvious in a broad racial sense and relatively superficial in Shults's treatment of it. Narratively, there are no new insights here, although a tremendous cast exhibits truth and grace no matter the shakiness of the picture's framework and genesis. Well into the second decade of the new millennia, however, I guess I'm advocating for stories like this to be told from a different point of view. Failing that, Waves is ultimately a Stanley Kramer melodrama with a banging, transcendent Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack/score. It has the best of intentions, no question, but I've seen this story told in this voice before.

Telluride '19: Epilogue

by Walter Chaw There's a scoop in the mountain face on the way back from Telluride, like a bite has been taken from the rock. Below is a clear, blue lake fed by snowmelt, so the water is bitterly cold. I found it by accident. I stop there every year to break up my drive. This year I sat on the beach for a while, stood up a few bleached wood branches into something like a cairn, took my shoes off, dug my toes into the sand, and soaked them for a minute in the water as shoals of fry darted around. I sucked air in through my teeth. I nodded off to the sound of the water lapping and the wind in the grass by the road, and I thought of this passage from The Sound and the Fury:

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

House of Games (1987) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum, J.T. Walsh
screenplay by David Mamet
directed by David Mamet

by Bryant Frazer House of Games pivots on a hand of poker that spirals out of control and reveals itself as more than a mere card game. It's a moral hazard. On one side of the table, holding three of a kind, is Mike (Joe Mantegna), a small-time hood with a big mouth who runs a card room out of the back of House of Games, a pool hall that sits upstairs from a paperback bookstore in downtown Seattle. Across from him, George (the late, great sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay, in his first film role), who may or may not have drawn to a trips-beating straight or a flush. Spectating from Mike's side is Margaret (Lindsay Crouse), a psychiatrist (and best-selling author) who stumbled upon the tableau in an effort to negotiate down the debt of a troubled patient (Steve Goldstein), a gambling addict. Impressed by Margaret's apparent fearlessness--when he makes an oblique threat to kill her, she calls him a bully--Mike enlists her help in a scheme that isn't cheating, per se, but does rely on duplicity. Simply put, Mike contrives to leave the room for a few minutes; in his absence, Margaret watches for an indication that George is bluffing and signals Mike, quietly, to call.

3 from Hell (2019)

***/****
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Bill Moseley, Richard Brake, Sid Haig
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw 3 From Hell's twin fathers are Sam Peckinpah and Jim Thompson; when Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) screams "Kill em, kill em all!" in obvious emulation of that iconic early moment in The Wild Bunch, she announces that the picture's setting in a disgusting Mexican villa is not just purposeful, but meaningful and pointed. In scope, the film is better framed as Rob Zombie's The Getaway, which, as may be expected, keeps the surreal, cannibalistic ending from the novel, unlike either of its proper adaptations. Indeed, 3 From Hell is as sordid, violent, base as anything from Peckinpah or Thompson; and an observant a satire of how the world runs on the threat of violence and the promise of sex. Likewise, it's steeped in self-loathing, that sense that everything is in an active state of putrefaction. If The Getaway can be read with profit as a film about the transactional nature of human relationships, Zombie's films are also best considered as detailed, acutely sensitive explorations of human, especially familial, relationships. 3 From Hell is his most pointed statement about the nigh insurmountable cost of existence. The marriage makes sense, as life is never cheap in Zombie's films. In fact, life and the living of it, is really fucking expensive, and no one gets out alive.

Attn: The 27th Annual Vintage Film Festival

Attention classic-film buffs and TCM junkies:

Since FILM FREAK CENTRAL is technically a Canadian website, based in southern Ontario, I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you about the 27^th annual Port Hope Vintage Film Festival. Running from September 27-29, it's a rare opportunity to see classic films--such as Top Hat, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and La Belle et La Bête (the theme for 2019 is, you guessed it, Famous Cinematic Duos)--on the big screen, at Port Hope's gorgeous Capitol Theatre (pictured above). Proceeds go to the Marie Dressler Foundation, which is raising money this year to provide bursaries for local high-school students. There's even going to be a silent auction where you can bid on movie memorabilia and other ephemera--including some DVDs that may or may not have been donated by yours truly. Further details here!-Ed.

Ad Astra (2019)

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler, Ruth Negga, Tommy Lee Jones
written by James Gray & Ethan Gross
directed by James Gray

by Walter Chaw James Gray's Ad Astra is the sort of movie people who don't like Terrence Malick think Terrence Malick movies are like. It's overwritten to the point of self-parody in some places (consider a scene aboard a Mars-bound shuttle where our hero's patrilineage is mentioned, reacted to, discussed at length, and then brought up again), with a voiceover that doesn't invite introspection so much as comparisons to Harrison Ford's reluctant Blade Runner exposition. Imagine the version of this film with about a quarter of the lengthy chit-chat--or even one that doesn't mistrust its lead's performance so much that a scene where he's acting out his betrayal isn't underscored with narration: "Goddamnit, they're using me!" It's such a handsome film, with cinematography by Interstellar's Hoyte van Hoytema, that one is inclined to forgive this second consecutive attempt by Gray to make Apocalypse Now, except that it plays unforgivably like a "For Dummies" version of an ecstatic picture. Imagine the Carlos Reygadas version, or the Peter Strickland one (Ad Astra most resembles a super-chatty Berberian Sound Studio). Or just watch the Claire Denis version, High Life, which asks many of the same big questions as Ad Astra without asking them explicitly. Nor trying to answer them.

TIFF 2019: Atlantiques

Atlantique
***/****
starring Mama Sané, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré, Nicole Sougou
screenplay by Mati Diop, Olivier Demangel
directed by Mati Diop

by Angelo Muredda Working from her own 2009 short Atlantiques, first-time feature director Mati Diop makes a bold impression with Atlantics. An elegant film that will hopefully lose the ungainly subtitle "A Ghost Love Story" by the time it makes its way to Netflix (where it's bound in the coming months), it's an awfully strong directorial calling card with a distinctive rhythm and point of view, its tactility and sensuousness evoking the work of Diop's former director and mentor Claire Denis without losing its own youthful verve.

TIFF 2019: Uncut Gems

***/****
starring Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Idina Menzel, Judd Hirsch
screenplay by Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie
directed by Benny Safdie & Josh Safdie

by Walter Chaw Enfants terrible Josh and Bennie Safdie follow-up their kinetic crime thriller Good Time with Uncut Gems, another helping of the same packed with so much anxiety and energy that it becomes exhausting a good while before it's done with you. Opening in an Ethiopian opal mine, where a huge-karated black specimen is unearthed in secret by subsistence miners while one of their compatriots wails in agony over a nasty open fracture in his leg, Uncut Gems then cuts to diamond dealer Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) getting a colonoscopy. When not having the inside of his bowels photographed, he's ensconced in his little retail hole in New York's Diamond District, doing his best to fend off an endless wave of creditors while looking for that one big score. In a recent (i.e., February, 2019) article in INTERVIEW, Patrick McGraw memorably describes that stretch of West 47^th between 5^th and 6^th avenues as "...a composite of fake teeth, cheap cologne, aviators, dyed hair, machismo, self-loathing, and seemingly uncontrollable gesticulating"--a good description of Howard, too, as it happens, as Sandler finally finds a dramatic role the equal now of his finest hour, Punch-Drunk Love. Howard is not unlike Barry, the role he played in P.T. Anderson's film--if Barry had no success managing his sudden fits of manic rage.

TIFF 2019: Sound of Metal

***/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Mathieu Amalric, Paul Raci
written by Abraham Marder & Darius Marder
directed by Darius Marder

by Angelo Muredda It comes as a pleasant jolt that there's a lot to say about Sound of Metal, The Place Beyond the Pines' co-screenwriter Darius Marder's feature debut. On paper, the story of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a noise-metal drummer and recovering addict who suddenly loses his hearing in the middle of a tour with his girlfriend and musical partner Lou (Olivia Cooke), seems like the stuff of a run-of-the-mill disability melodrama about learning to appreciate life's little pleasures in silence. And though it veers close to something like that message in its final moments, which threaten to put a bow on a rather messy human drama, the film is surprisingly complicated about the new worlds, sensory experiences, and cultures in which Ruben is being initiated.

TIFF 2019: Joker

**/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Robert De Niro
written by Todd Phillips & Scott Silver
directed by Todd Phillips

by Bill Chambers Two moments that soar: in the one, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), having just shed the last vestments of propriety, dons the complete outfit of his alter ego Joker--the green hair, the white face, the purple suit--for the first time and does an impromptu dance to Gary Glitter's stadium staple "Rock and Roll Part 2" on an empty stairway in Gotham City. In the other, stand-up comic Joker achieves his dream of guesting on "The Murray Franklin Show". The former is great because the music is at once non-diegetic and clearly prodding Joker; it's one of the few times we're indisputably inside his head, and, naturally, he's soundtracked his grand entrance like he's the star pitcher coming out to wow the crowd in the sixth inning. (Phoenix is arguably the first actor since Cesar Romero to accept that Joker isn't just a psychopath, he's also a complete dork.) The latter distinctly reminded me of Phoenix's standoffish appearance on Letterman while he was in the throes of shooting the mockumentary I'm Still Here, but the reason the sequence works is that it's legitimately suspenseful watching Robert De Niro's Murray Franklin harangue Joker on live television, stoking a burning fuse. De Niro's presence is of course a nod to Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy, in which he's an aspiring comedian so desperate to do his act on "The Jerry Langford Show" that he stalks and eventually kidnaps the titular Jerry (Jerry Lewis). Despite that legacy casting, a particularly baleful De Niro is morbidly implausible as a talk-show host of legend, yet his proto-Morton Downey Jr. is defensible in that it looks ahead to the rise of today's angry pundits. Unlike his ingratiating contemporaries (Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Jerry Langford)--period markers, including the cheesy glitz of "The Murray Franklin Show"'s set design, suggest the film takes place circa 1980--Murray seems to be jonesing for conflict. Incidentally, De Niro's head hasn't been this square since Midnight Run.

TIFF 2019: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

***/****
starring Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Enrico Colantoni, Chris Cooper
written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue & Noah Harpster
directed by Marielle Heller

by Angelo Muredda Marielle Heller follows the biting character drama of Can You Ever Forgive Me? with a refreshingly non-traditional biopic about a decidedly warmer public figure than Lee Israel in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the second film about Fred Rogers in the past year and certainly the more interesting one. An aesthetic and dramatic curiosity, where a more timid hagiography in the mood of Morgan Neville's celebrated documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? might have sufficed, Heller's take, starring a perfectly modulated and near-uncannily cast Tom Hanks (his decidedly non-Rogers gut aside), treats the children's broadcaster not so much as a person with a life story worth profiling, but as a contagion for radical ways of sublimating anger in children and adults alike.

TIFF 2019: The Twentieth Century

***½/****
starring Daniel Beirne, Sarianne Cormier, Mikhaïl Ahooja, Catherine St-Laurent
written and directed by Matthew Rankin

by Angelo Muredda Matthew Rankin makes good on the promise of his singular shorts in his rambunctious and beguiling feature debut The Twentieth Century, a ten-part portrait of the famously uncharismatic but long-serving Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, played to milky-white, moony-eyed perfection by Dan Beirne. A wildly inventive dramatization of the formative pre-office days of the nation's only P.M. to host seances with his dead dogs (as most students of Canadian history will remember), the film makes bold use of the formal language of early cinema as well as the seemingly diametrically opposed Canadian penchants for shame and degeneracy.

Telluride 2019: A Hidden Life

****/****
starring August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruno Ganz
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life takes its title from George Eliot's Middlemarch:

...for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

I've read that over and over since watching the film to realize the more I do, the more it feels cool, soothing against my tongue as a tonic does, or an oath devoutly felt. It's a roadmap to a life lived faithfully to an ideal rather than enslaved to other considerations, venal or material--and the way I think most sensitive, intelligent, moral beings wish to live, had they only the means to do it. Especially if they don't. Freedom shouldn't be something we afford, but rather something we can't afford to be without. A Hidden Life is an ecstatic telling, like Malick's The New World, of the life of a real person. In this case, of Austrian saint Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), beatified in 2007; his martyrdom is told here in a manner half like The Passion of Joan of Arc and half an imagistic adaptation of William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis." It's heartbreaking in its beauty, immense in its sadness, and so topical as to be all but unbearable. The tragedy of us is that this story will always be topical.

Telluride 2019: The Climb

***/****
starring Michael Covino, Kyle Marvin, Gayle Rankin, George Wendt
written by Kyle Marvin & Michael Covino
directed by Michael Covino

by Walter Chaw Michael Covino's The Climb paints a portrait of male friendship through a series of clever, tightly-scripted vignettes that depict the buddies in question at several points in their lives. It opens with Mike (director and co-writer Covino) and Kyle (co-writer Kyle Marvin) riding a bike up a steep grade--the perfect opportunity for Mike to confess to the less-in-shape Kyle that he's had an affair with Kyle's fiancée. It's a funny conceit carried by Mike and Kyle's rapport: Kyle, furious, can't quite catch up with Mike to kill him; Mike admitting that was the plan all along. The film then jumps forward to a funeral, a Christmas party (where Kyle's mom (Talia Balsam) says everything except what she means when recruiting a drunken Mike into her plan to separate her kid from the woman, Marissa (Gayle Rankin), whom everyone hates), a wedding, and so on, until finally lands it at a place where it becomes clear that despite the ever-changing circumstances of their lives, Mike and Kyle's friendship, like all good friendships, stayed exactly the same.

It: Chapter Two (2019)

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Bill Skarsgård
screenplay by Gary Dauberman, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Calling the monster "It" suggests some BigBad that should not be named in polite company--molestation, suicide and depression, abandonment, abuse (domestic or otherwise)--and Andy Muschietti's It: Chapter Two (hereafter It 2) covers each of those bases, literally, along the way of what turns out to be a painfully sensitive metaphor for how the things that happen to us in childhood dig their talons into how we function as adults. Not unlike the pointedly named It Follows, It 2 is a horror film about our personal and collective loss of innocence and the many ways we unsuccessfully suppress our trauma: "It" always escapes the containers we put it into--an idea illustrated explicitly at one point in the film as a thing too big for the rituals we use to tame it magnifies in the Jungian sense and explodes in the Freudian, laying waste to our carefully-cultivated gardens. It's possible to outgrow a fear of clowns--a lot less likely that we'll ever outgrow the litany of disasters that fed the fear of clowns in the first place. My mom is dying. Dealing with it has unearthed all of these memories I'd hidden away, of our relationship and of my childhood. I'm not armed. Neither are the "losers" of It 2.

Telluride 2019: Parasite

****/****
starring Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik
screenplay by Bong Joon-ho, Han Jin-won
directed by Bong Joon-ho

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) has a plan. He lives with his family at the end of an alley on the bottom-level of a tri-level apartment building--meaning they're halfway underground and the drunks have a tendency to pee right outside their windows. Ki-woo's dad, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), insists on leaving the windows open anyway. He likes the fresh air. Ki-woo's buddy Min (Park Seo-joon), a University kid as smooth as Ki-woo is rumpled, gives the family a large, decorative river rock mounted on a base. You know, for luck. He also gives Ki-woo a reference for a gig as an English tutor to a rich girl, Da-hye (Jung Ziso), whose neurotic mom, Mrs. Park (Jo Yeo-jeong), is desperate to maintain her own household's equilibrium, such as it is. Most of that involves managing Da-hye and Da-hye's hyperactive little brother, Da-song (Jung Hyun-jun), who, between pretending to be a Native American launching plastic arrows at housekeeper Moon-gwang (Lee Jeong-eun), does the usual things a hyperactive little kid does. His mom thinks he's a genius, but she worries about that thing that happened to him in first grade when they found him catatonic and foaming at the mouth. "When they're that age, you have fifteen minutes," she says. She's never been the same. Ki-woo, meanwhile, is sick of living in poverty--his entire family is out of work in a brutal economy. His plan is that once he's inculcated himself into the Park family household, he's going to get the rest of his family jobs there, too.

TIFF 2019: Pain and Glory + Varda by Agnès

Dolor y gloria
***½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Asier Exteandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Varda par Agnès
****/****
directed by Agnès Varda

by Bill Chambers Salvador Mallo is first seen in hydrotherapy for his scarred back, lost in an underwater reverie. The lapping waves trigger a memory of his mother (Penélope Cruz, who must have a painting of herself rotting away in the attic) washing clothes in the river when he was just a boy. Played by Pedro Almodóvar discovery and muse Antonio Banderas, Salvador is an informally retired film director who dresses like Almodóvar, resides in Almodóvar's real-life apartment, and suffers a litany of ailments--spinal problems, tinnitus--much like Almodóvar's own. The kinkiness of Almodóvar's work has always made it seem personal and confessional, but with Pain and Glory he moves into the roman à clef territory of Bob Fosse's All That Jazz--although Pain and Glory is considerably more chill, treating even picking up a heroin habit in middle age as less self-destructive than incorrigible. Salvador is introduced to the drug while making amends with Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), star of his acclaimed Sabor ("Flavour"). Alberto is a long-time junkie; Salvador once held this against his performance in Sabor but no longer does, because time has altered his perception of it. The two agree to do a Q&A at a screening of the film's restoration, which, uh, doesn't quite go as planned but does lead to Alberto putting on an unpublished play that Salvador wrote, which leads to Salvador briefly reconnecting with Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the old lover the play is about. This spurs him to be proactive about his health: Salvador realizes that he needs to get back to making art, because sharing this one story with others has turned out to be so much more rewarding than wallowing in nostalgia.

TIFF 2019: The Goldfinch

*/****
starring Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Aneurin Barnard, Nicole Kidman
screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the novel by Donna Tartt
directed by John Crowley

by Angelo Muredda How do you solve a problem like The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt's infinitely Instagrammable, stridently "literary" Pulitzer Prize winner? That's the riddle behind Brooklyn helmer John Crowley's flop-sweating adaptation, which strives to be faithful to an unruly text but has little formal bombast of its own to justify the second pass. Chasing after a serious tome of dubious merit, the sort of thing that has been called Dickensian largely because it involves a male orphan at the mercy of kind strangers, the nouveau Goldfinch--not to be confused with the so-named painting its protagonist snatches from the rubble of a terrorist attack at the Met in both versions--gets all the warmed-over thematic pronouncements and outré stock characters of the novel and none of the confidence. That makes it one of the most conspicuously flat prestige failures in recent memory, a film only a festival audience paying for the honour of seeing Nicole Kidman gingerly waving up to the balcony could love.

TIFF 2019: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
***½/****
starring Luàna Bajrami, Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Valeria Golino
written and directed by Céline Sciamma

by Angelo Muredda "If you look at me, who do I look at?" young noblewoman and bride-to-be Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) asks of Marianne (Noémie Merlant), the artist tasked with painting her marriage portrait, midway through Céline Sciamma's beautifully conceived if somewhat airless Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a historical romance that would easily replace Call Me by Your Name as the swoon-inducing queer love story du jour (with a comparably stunning ending) for youths to share memes from on Tumblr, if Tumblr weren't moribund. That moment of a living art object impishly talking back to the woman who is ostensibly capturing her for posterity works as both quippy wordplay and thematic key. Like much of the Cannes-awarded screenplay, one of the Alejandro González Iñárritu-chaired jury's numerous astute picks, that exchange is doing double-work in a film that's earnestly invested in raising the question of what kinds of lives are representable, and in exploring the tenuous line between lovers from different stations as well as portrait artists and their objects of study.

Telluride 2019: The Aeronauts

ZERO STARS/****
starring Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne, Himesh Patel, Anne Reid
written by Jack Thorne
directed by Tom Harper

by Walter Chaw If you would've thought that a film about the early days of meteorology would be deadly and ridiculous: good call. Tom Harper's The Aeronauts imagines plucky meteorologist James Glashier (Eddie Redmayne) as a starry-eyed dreamer certain that one day humans will predict the weather badly in front of bluescreens. In pursuit of this, he enlists the aid of tragic hot-air balloonist (well, not hot air at that time--gas of some sort) Amilia Renne (Felicity Jones), a fictional character standing in for the real James Glashier's erstwhile ballooning companion, Henry Tracey Coxwell. See, all the names are hilarious: the Glashier that will not melt damn the torpedoes, the pretty flying "wren," and in real life there was a "Coxwell." Anyhow, Amelia, named after the other woman pilot you know the name of, is a showman, arriving late to the launching grounds riding on top of her carriage (can you imagine!) with her trick dog and her magic voice that carries several football pitches in every direction with no magnification. You can tell from the start that James doesn't approve of her showboating, except that the way the film is structured--as a series of flashbacks detailing their relationship--it's clear that James has sought her out because of her draw as a public attraction. You can tell from the start, too, that the real vertical ascent is the friends they'll become along the way.

Telluride 2019: The Report

**½/****
starring Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Ted Levine, Jon Hamm
written by Scott Z. Burns, based on the article "Rorschach and Awe" by Katherine Eban
directed by Scott Z. Burns

by Walter Chaw The very definition of "nutritious cinema," The Report details the process of writing and the struggles to publish the Senate oversight report on CIA torture tactics during the Bush II administration. The directorial debut of screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, a frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator, it's dry as a soda cracker and full of the deep shadows of an All The President's Men but without, alas, much of the kineticism. The problem with movies like this is that the key audience for them probably doesn't have a lot to learn from the revelations therein. What remains, then, is a procedural exercise with a known resolution that starts to feel repetitive at the same time it starts to feel depressing. Adam Driver is typically good as Senate analyst Daniel Jones, driven by the events of 9/11 to pursue a career in intelligence. Over the course of five years working as part of a small team for Sen. Diane Feinstein (Annette Bening), he uncovers a narrative within the CIA that torture does not produce good information, that there was precious little oversight over the agency, and that although the Obama presidency abolished "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," it was deeply interested in keeping Jones's report out of the public eye.

Telluride '19: Judy

*½/****
starring Renée Zellweger, Jessie Buckley, Finn Wittrock, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Tom Edge, based on the stageplay "End of the Rainbow" by Peter Quilter
directed by Rupert Goold

by Walter Chaw One problem with hagiographies is that when bad things happen to the sainted subject, it comes off as maudlin and self-pitying. Another problem with hagiographies is that they're boring, since they're largely impenetrable to anyone not already in the choir. Take Rupert Goold's Judy, for instance, a hagiography of one of the two or three most biographied figures from Hollywood's golden age, Judy Garland: Mickey Rooney's erstwhile song and dance partner, Dorothy Gale, gay icon, mom to Liza (and Lorna and Joey), and deeply troubled trainwreck who died of a barbiturate overdose at the tender age of 47. She's played by Renée Zellweger in the film with an eye towards puckish grit and mawkish imitation, imagining a character instead of a person in a movie designed to do exactly the same thing. What's assumed, though, is that people will know going into the film why Judy was essentially homeless as Judy opens; how she thought a run at the Hippodrome (then the "Talk of the Town" nightclub) in the City of Westminster, London might rescue her financial calamities; and what it was exactly that made her so appealing to so many for so long. That's a lot of assumptions and, you know, fair enough, because I can't think of anyone else who'd possibly be interested in Judy, anyway.

Telluride '19: Marriage Story

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

by Walter Chaw Another of Noah Baumbach's careful deconstructions of familial relationships, Marriage Story is maybe the best movie of its kind since John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman were traversing the same ground. It's a horror film about what happens when a couple decides to divorce and "lawyer up" to protect their interests. At about the midpoint, a kindly attorney, Bert (Alan Alda), muses out loud, and pleasantly, that it doesn't really make sense to bankrupt college funds in the pursuit of what's best for the children of divorce. It's one of dozens of piquant moments in a piece that makes clear it isn't taking sides. Or if it is, it's on the side of a lull in aggressions. In war, after all, there are no winners among the combatants--just casualties, fatalities, and other victims of traumatic misadventure.

Telluride '19: Motherless Brooklyn

*/****
starring Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Edward Norton, based on the novel by Jonathan Lethem
directed by Edward Norton

by Walter Chaw Edward Norton's twenty-year passion project, this adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's modern noir loses what's affecting about the source material while amplifying, well, Edward Norton. The hero, Lionel Essrog (Norton), is afflicted with OCD and Tourette's. In the book, this means that as his interior monologue is crisp and empathetic, his exterior is kissing people and screaming out anagrams and clever atrocities. In the movie, this means Norton is angling hard for awards recognition playing Rain Man as a gumshoe. I don't mean to be unkind, merely to describe a selfish performance that does very much to attract attention to itself and very little to support a cast that frankly needn't have bothered. It's the worst first date ever--the one where the guy really wants to tell you about himself. Norton's Lionel twitches, grimaces, screams out jibes that are sometimes a little too literary and on-the-mark. He draws attention and that's half the point of it: to create a sensitive, intelligent character appalled by his inability to control his "broken" brain. Yet in an ensemble movie with a Byzantine plot, all it does is suck the air out of the room. There's a shortlist of "unfilmable" novels for any number of reasons (and a few of those, like Under the Skin, were adapted beautifully), but the reasons to leave Motherless Brooklyn free from this sort of literal go are legion.

Telluride '19: An Introduction

by Walter Chaw About 16 months ago, my mom received an 18-month diagnosis--meaning she has maybe two months to live. We'll see. When I broke it to my parents that I was dropping out of the engineering track at college to pursue a degree in English, there was a lot of silence and then my mom said: "Don't write about us." I don't think I honoured her request for even a second. This is the first time I've written about her directly, but I don't believe it's possible to not write your shit. I mean, if you're doing it right. I think if you read my stuff, for whatever reason, with the right eye and the right experience, it wouldn't be difficult to nail what my issues are. They're florid and manifold: beware when hunting monsters and all that.

Gwen (2019)

***/****
starring Maxine Peake, Eleanor Worthington-Cox
written and directed by William McGregor

by Alice Stoehr The place is Wales. The time is the past. The subject is a penniless family of three. Mancunian actress Maxine Peake plays the sallow, unsmiling mother of two girls: little Mari (Jodie Innes) and teenage Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox). They live in a ramshackle farmhouse amid mossy boulders and fields of emerald grass. The sky tends to be thickly overcast; particles of soot get everywhere. Wind rasps the valley and pervades the sound design by Anna Bertmark, whose credits include You Were Never Really Here. The soundscape is much like that of Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, another film about rural privation on an uncaring earth. Snow falls, thunder cracks, and the family's meagre assets dwindle. This is the starting point for Gwen, William McGregor's flinty debut feature. McGregor started in British television, with shows like "Misfits" and the period drama "Poldark", on both of which he collaborated with Gwen's cinematographer Adam Etherington. The two of them put tremendous discipline into the film's style, shooting across the Welsh countryside in early winter. They apply a rich visual lexicon to this desolate space: focus pulls, slow pans and zooms, reflections in sullied glass. Due to the era's lack of electricity, they favour backlighting, with pale sun penetrating the house's gloom. Night scenes rely on the unsteady and audible flames of candles or torches. It's a world of fog and fire and dirt.

Adam (2019)

**½/****
starring Nicholas Alexander, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Leo Sheng, Margaret Qualley
screenplay by Ariel Schrag, based on her novel
directed by Rhys Ernst

by Alice Stoehr The first five minutes of Adam offer a concise sketch of its title character. He's an unsuave 17-year-old from a Bay Area suburb; his parents fret over his social life; and he's spending summer 2006 in a closet at his lesbian sister's Bushwick apartment. Screenwriter Ariel Schrag condenses the first 40 pages of her 2014 novel into this prologue, after which the credits accompany Adam's first cab ride through Brooklyn. A montage of murals and graffiti flashes past. Nicholas Alexander plays Adam, his hair floppy, his expression glazed, as a vessel ready to be kiln-fired and filled. (He looks a little like Ice Storm-era Tobey Maguire.) He's the star of this bildungsroman about a young man's initiation into the LGBT community and the glaring fact of his own cisness.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

***½/****
starring Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Dean Norris
screenplay by Dan Hageman & Kevin Hageman, based on the series by Alvin Schwartz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw André Øvredal's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (hereafter Scary Stories) is a dulcet, autumnal picture balanced right there between the endless summers of dandelion wine and the interminable and harsh winters of brutality that lie ahead. A project based on a beloved series of children's books by Alvin Schwartz, it transcends its source by understanding the true function of little nightmares: the stories we tell our kids to begin to toughen them up for lives spent in this hell. Scary Stories unfolds, essentially, in the days between Halloween, 1968 and Election Night (November 5th) of that same year, when Richard Nixon won the Presidency on a date that disrupted 36 years of New Deal expansion. Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic nominee, but only after Bobby was shot (just a short while after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot); the beheading of the Democratic party's progressive soul was now complete. George Wallace, a piece of shit still somehow not as repugnant as Donald Trump, carried five states that night by promising racial segregation. Old footage of Walter Kronkite delivering the results of the election provides the background for a young woman, Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), trying in vain to convince the adults that things are not going to be okay before calling her recently-widowed dad to tell him that all the disappointments of the world are not his alone to carry. It would be instructive to watch Scary Stories as the warm-up feature for Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. Both occupy the same dream-space, the same halcyon "the past" where everything is possible until it isn't anymore. The surprise is that of the two films, it's Scary Stories that is the less hopeful.