Film Freak Central

TIFF '23: Seagrass

***½/****
starring Ally Maki, Luke Roberts, Nyha Breitkreuz, Chris Pang
written and directed by Meredith Hama-Brown

by Bill Chambers I always brace for gloom when out come the tiny title fonts--in Canada, they're the cinematic equivalent of a funeral director solemnly gesturing towards the casket--but Meredith Hama-Brown's FIPRESCI-winning Seagrass quickly dispelled my cynicism by being so obviously good. Judith (Ally Maki) and Steve (Luke Roberts) are a mixed-race couple with two young daughters, 11-year-old Stephanie (Nyha Breitkreuz) and six-year-old Emmy (Remy Marthaller). Theirs is a troubled marriage, complicated by the recent death of Judith's mother, and so they've travelled with the kids to a couples retreat on the Pacific coast for therapy and respite. There, they meet their mirror image in Pat (Chris Pang) and Carol (Sarah Gadon), handsome marrieds who appear to be farther along in their reconciliation. (Either that, or they're better at presenting a united front.) Judith regards Pat with undeniable yet enigmatic interest and Steve picks up on it, creating a lopsided tension between the two men. But gradually, from the nature of Judith's complaints about Steve--how he never wants to go anywhere exotic; how he doesn't seem to appreciate the depths of her grief, or comprehend her nostalgia for a childhood that sounds like it was mired in hardship--it becomes clear that whatever her physical attraction to Pat, he's thrown Steve's whiteness and all that that implies into stark relief. (Because it's set in the 1990s, unenlightened Steve falls easily into syllogistic traps like asking how he could be a racist when he has a Japanese wife, while Judith lacks the language of rebuttal.) She looks at Pat and wonders, perhaps, if an Asian partner would make her feel less conspicuous. Less ashamed. Less alone.

That Old Witchcraft: FFC Interviews Tereza Nvotová

Walter Chaw interviews Tereza Nvotová, co-writer/director of NIGHTSIREN

Tereza Nvotová's Nightsiren (Svetlonoc) was among the handful of titles that blew me away at this year's long-ago-feeling Boston Underground Film Festival. It's smart, beautiful, savage, and from a part of the world, Slovakia, with whose cinema I'm unfamiliar. (Ditto the filmmaking team of Nvotová and her co-writer, Barbora Namerova.) Part folk-horror and part female-empowerment/coming-of-age melodrama, Nightsiren demonstrates an ease with archetype and the courage to use funding provided by the Slovakian government to create a piece that questions the country's systems and traditions uncompromisingly. It's righteous.

Telluride '23: Daddio

***/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sean Penn
written and directed by Christy Hall

by Walter Chaw Girlie (Dakota Johson) gets in a cab from JFK to Manhattan, and over the long drive through construction slowdowns and other diversions, she and driver Clark (Sean Penn)...talk. Girlie receives a few lewd texts from her lover, sure, but Clark praises her for how little she's on her phone in this age of screen intermediaries. He's surprised again when she wants to know his name: "You are a human being," he says, and there's hardly anyone who could deliver this line the way Penn does: free of insinuation or sarcasm, hinting at emotions like gratefulness and even flattered surprise. Penn is one of our great "face" actors. Robbed of tools other performers rely upon, he won an Oscar for Dead Man Walking, where he spent most of his time behind a glass partition, shackled to a table. The four inches reflected in the rearview mirror in Daddio are a better actor than almost anyone who's ever done this. His persona outside of film has outgrown him in many ways, but I was shocked by how glad I was to be in his company again. Penn's large humanitarian gestures and vile history of abuse, spotlighted whenever he shares his unevolved and indeed apparently devolving Neanderthal viewpoints on women and consent have obscured his accomplishments as an actor. Perhaps rightfully so. Seeing him on a big screen again made me realize how much I'd missed him in this context--and how much I wish it were the only context in which I knew him.

TIFF '23: Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros

***½/****
directed by Frederick Wiseman

by Angelo Muredda Frederick Wiseman sets his sights on legacy-planning in Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, the venerable documentarian's staggering but typically graceful 240-minute tour of La Maison Troisgros, a fine-dining restaurant in Roanne, France that has held onto its three Michelin stars for decades. A family-run establishment, the place is shepherded by gruff third-generation chef-owner Michel, who we meet sampling the wares in the market with his more subdued son and protégé, César, before they settle into a favourite Wiseman scene: a sit-down meeting to plan the evening's menu that's equal parts absorbing and boring. Though Wiseman treats the day's market-fresh cauliflower and mushrooms like movie stars in a rapid montage of stills resembling a credit sequence, the real stars and main anchor points he returns to throughout his amiably rambling cross-section of the restaurant--which sets aside a full 30-minute chapter for the cheese man--are the Troisgros men, different kinds of chefs whose diverging styles while working under the same roof embody the restaurant's past, present, and future.

Telluride '23: All of Us Strangers

****/****
starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy
screenplay by Andrew Haigh, based on the novel by Taichi Yamada
directed by Andrew Haigh

by Walter Chaw What if I could? What if I did and they were there, my parents as I remember them when I was 12, and I was not so fixed in time and grief? When I was a child and needed them even though I thought I didn't, but now, as the old man who knows I still do. What if I went to the place where I grew up and rang the bell and they answered it, and I could tell them the things I had done that would make them proud of me? And the things I never could tell them because I was afraid they'd reject me again for everything I could've helped and everything I couldn't. I can see them in the living room. I can see them in the kitchen. What if they, knowing how short the time had gotten, could tell me what was in their hearts so I didn't have to wonder? Was there love there that had hardened? Or had it retreated to an armoured place to protect it from breaking? In Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers, a man tells his new lover how something awful happened to him once, but it's okay because it was a long time ago. His lover corrects him: "A long time ago" doesn't matter when you're talking about terrible things. "Oh," the man says, and quieter, "oh."

TIFF '23: Sleep + Smugglers

SLEEP
Jam
**/****
starring Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun
written and directed by Jason Yu

SMUGGLERS
Milsu
***/****
starring Kim Hye-soo, Yum Jung-ah, Park Jeong-min, Zo In-sung
screenplay by Ryoo Seung-wan, Kim Jeong-yeon
directed by Ryoo Seung-wan

by Bill Chambers Jason Yu's Sleep had me at hello. Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) are a young couple expecting their first child. One night, out of the blue, Hyun-Su starts talking in his sleep. "Someone's inside," he says. Soo-jin wonders if he's trying to tell her something. It's the opening scene of Poltergeist with considerably less grandeur, but horror, like punk, thrives in lo-fi. (The movie's biggest formal swing is to instantaneously alter the mood of a scene through jump cuts or abrupt lighting changes.) Though Hyun-Su has no memory of the incident, he thinks he knows why he said what he said: because he's an actor and one of the lines he has in his current project is, "Someone's inside the building." It's enough to placate Soo-jin until the following night, when he dozes off and...well, you'll have to see for yourself. Soon, bedtime becomes a jack-in-the-box full of nasty surprises that have Soo-jin sleeping with one eye open. A doctor gives Hyun-su what would be very practical and hopeful advice for someone suffering from an actual sleep disorder, but is that what's going on? Or is something supernatural waiting until he lies down at night to use him as a marionette? And what, if anything, do the new downstairs neighbours, a single mother and her adolescent son, have to do with his condition?

TIFF '23: Evil Does Not Exist

悪は存在しない
Aku wa sonzai shinai
***½/****
starring Hitoshi Omika, Ryo Nishikawa, Ryuji Kosaka, Ayaka Shibutani
written and directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

by Angelo Muredda Evil is a big-city land developer running a roadside Zoom meeting with his gormless staff about the fastest way to turn a self-sustaining village into an anonymous corporate glamping site in Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist. An ice-cold followup to the more reassuring awards darling Drive My Car, it's a remarkable slow-burn thriller about the human capacity to look away from the downstream effects of our disruptions to natural equilibrium, dressing that violence up in HR-friendly euphemisms the ecosystems we're poisoning couldn't care less about.

TIFF '23: Seven Veils

***/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Liddiard, Douglas Smith, Mark O'Brien
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda Atom Egoyan hits his stride again in Seven Veils, a playful and self-reflexive backstage drama about the re-staging of a Canadian Opera Company production of Richard Strauss's Salome, which Egoyan, lover of complicated matryoshka-doll narrative structures and intertextuality, has twice mounted for the same company, first in 1996, then in February of this year. Footage from both of those versions becomes the obscure scene of the crime in the film, where director Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried, reuniting with Egoyan after the underrated Chloe) is in the challenging process of remounting a production previously directed by her mentor and apparent groomer Charles, who integrated cryptic home movies of her ritualistic abuse at the hands of her father into the original work--video elements that, of course, were also foregrounded in Egoyan's stagings of the opera. While Jeanine is wrestling personal and professional demons to get the remounting into shape and dealing with her conservative minders at the COC, who'd rather she discard her aesthetic changes and relegate her incendiary director's note to a blog or a podcast (where, you can almost hear Egoyan snickering, it'll never be heard), props master Clea (Rebecca Liddiard) is documenting her behind-the-scenes work on her humble iPhone, inadvertently capturing another sex crime that makes her both a survivor and a potential power player.

Telluride '23: El Conde

***½/****
starring Alfredo Castro, Catalina Guerra, Paula Luchsinger, Diego Muñoz
written by Guillermo Calderón & Pablo Larraín
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw El Conde is the bitterest of farces: a satire of excess and great evil that uses vampirism as a blunt metaphor for the forces that sap places and entire peoples of their share of a nation's fortunes. Always timely, Chilean director Pablo Larraín turns his attention to his country's last bogey, Augusto Pinochet, who, with the support of the United States government, staged a brutal coup in 1973 and consequently ruled Chile with an iron hand until 1990. Among the disastrous programs initiated by his regime? Abolition of all trade unions--an act that seems specifically pointed, given the millions poured into this project by Netflix. The country's wealth tanked as Pinochet's exploded. At the time of his death in 2006, over 300 criminal charges were left pending against him. Larraín speculates that Pinochet staged his death to avoid continued persecution and is, in fact, a centuries-old vampire who once fed on the blood of Marie Antoinette. The image of a young Frenchman licking her blue blood fresh from the guillotine's blade is, in a tidy nutshell, critique of thaumaturgical contagion: hereditary wealth and power, distilled into the tastes of a vampire so smitten by the tang of royal blood that he steals the Queen's head and keeps it in a jar as a fetish object. When he seduces a young nun in the present day of the film, he first makes her dress up like Antoinette and is dismayed when she shows not just disinterest in the onanistic trophy he uses as a reference for her costume, but actual disgust.

Telluride '23: Nyad

*/****
starring Annette Bening, Jodie Foster, Rhys Ifans, Johnny Solo
screenplay by Julia Cox, based on the book by Diana Nyad
directed by Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

by Walter Chaw Film festivals are expensive and not profitable. They underpay their staff, which mostly comprises volunteers and a nomadic group of technicians who follow festivals around the country like roadies on an eternal tour, and they suffer from the need to please their wealthiest supporters, who, for the most part, have more money than taste. Certainly, they have more desire to be coddled than hunger for risk-taking. That's why, every year at the Telluride Film Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the country, there's an entry like thrill-seeker documentarians Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyl's Oscar-bait biopic Nyad. Last year it was Empire of Light, and the year before it was King Richard, and the year before that it was Judy. In 2017, there was that Battle of the Sexes thing about Billie Jean King, the only one I've mentioned to get zero traction at the Academy Awards. Each of these movies is as functionally formulaic as a suppository: machine-tooled and well-lubed, with only one measure for its success or failure. It either wins the middlebrow's greatest honour, thus enriching its producers, or it fails to do so. But are these movies any good? I wouldn't know how to begin to answer that question. Is a suppository good? I dunno, man, I don't spend much time thinking about a capsule I shoot out of my ass annually around this time of year.

TIFF '23: I Don't Know Who You Are

**½/****
starring Mark Clennon, Anthony Diaz, Nat Manuel, Michael Hogan
written and directed by M.H. Murray

by Bill Chambers Toronto scenester Benjamin (Mark Clennon) is a young, Black artist and musician getting his groove back after breaking up with his boyfriend and performing partner, Oscar (Kevin A. Courtney). He's a sweetheart, the sort of guy who sends what little spending money he has back home to his mother and makes ends meet giving music lessons to kids and empty-nesters around the neighbourhood. He's also a bit of a raw nerve: When his friend Ariel (Nat Manuel) teases him for not having slept with current beau Malcolm (Anthony Diaz) yet, she unwittingly sets off his insecurities about Malcolm's desire to take things slow. So begins a Friday night of heavy drinking that finds Benjamin running into Oscar, who's settled into a new relationship with ease. At first, then, it's a cheap boost to Benjamin's ego when a stranger (Michael Hogan) starts hitting on him on the way home, but soon the stranger's predatory intentions come into stark relief and Benjamin, too rubbery from wine to fight him off, is raped. The next day, instead of calling the police, going to the ER, or confiding in friends, Benjamin does something that feels psychologically acute in its irrationality and starts cleaning the fridge. I Don't Know Who You Are is at its best in these moments that defy exposition, and in fact there's an entire other movie happening, unspoken, about what, exactly, Benjamin's race means within his obviously inclusive but conspicuously white inner circle. One friend describes him as "our jukebox," which maybe isn't the compliment they think it is. (Benjamin points out that, unlike him, jukeboxes get paid.) His rapist is white, too, incidentally--and billed as "The Man."

Telluride '23: The Zone of Interest

****/****
starring Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam, Ralph Herforth
screenplay by Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Martin Amis
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw A real sense of evil permeates every nook and cranny of Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, which is an adaptation of the Martin Amis novel in the same way Glazer's Under the Skin is an adaptation of Michel Farber's novel. That is to say, one of tone and mood that discards all but the broadest strokes of the original premise. If Glazer applied the same process to this film as his previous one, he let the mysterious currents of his intuition guide his hand across the text. He is the philosopher as artist, an anthropologist locating himself in a human blind and documenting the mysterious movement of the dark as it oozes from one crooked and low place to another. I don't know how he finds the threads he pulls, but his fingers must be more sensitive than mine. I also don't entirely understand how he sneaks toxins past my defenses, desensitization, and tolerances: the draft you can never locate after the first freeze of a long winter locks you in place. Glazer isn't interested in moralizing, in trying to understand, even contextualize, how an ordinary, upper-middle-class military family in The Zone of Interest can owe their existence to mechanized genocide and feel no call to conscience. He doesn't see his characters as so complex they defy binary judgment; he sees them as so mechanical and simple they defy binary judgment. The universe tends to comfort. It's a fool's mission to impose systems of understanding on the ant Isserly beholds at the beginning of Under the Skin. Trying to do so could drive one to madness. Trying to do so says more about you than it does the ant.

TIFF '23: Anatomy of a Fall

Anatomie d'une chute
***/****
starring Sandra Hüller, Samuel Theis, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner
written by Justine Triet & Arthur Harari
directed by Justine Triet

by Angelo Muredda The list of thematic provocations is long in Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet's twisty Palme d'Or winner--the kind of winding, enigmatic character study that people who miss reading literary fiction wistfully describe as "novelistic." Even before the credits sequence, a montage of old family photos and videos taken in better times, we've been introduced to any number of hooks that one could build a hot-button arthouse legal thriller around. From the dead husband found at the bottom of a chalet by, of course, his blind son and support dog--below the window from which he either fell or was pushed--to the mysterious upstairs presence of his aloof, probably bisexual wife, a foreigner who isn't fluent in the language of the court she's about to be tried in, Anatomy of a Fall plants itself in the land of ambiguity and intrigue. That's to say nothing of the icy, wordless air we feel pass between the strained partners in the opening moments, where the now deceased man was blasting a steel-drum cover of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." on repeat during his author wife's flirtatious interview with a female student, still more circumstantial evidence for us to file away for later. From the start, then, Triet commits to a tricky balancing act, pitching her work somewhere between a formalist drama concerned with observation and perspective, attuned to what we can or can't know of a person or a marriage from the outside, and a more prurient genre exercise about killer wives, cuckolded husbands, and unseeing witnesses.

TIFF '23: The Teachers' Lounge

Das Lehrerzimmer
***/****
starring Leonie Benesch, Leonard Stettnisch, Eva Löbau, Michael Klammer
screenplay by Ilker Çatak, Johannes Duncker
directed by Ilker Çatak

by Bill Chambers At first, I thought the form of The Teachers' Lounge might be too classically sedate for a quasi-thriller with the dyspeptic energy of an Uncut Gems, but as elementary-school teacher Carla Nowak, a young idealist who's hyperconscious of power imbalances (a Polish immigrant at a German school, she's the kind of person who doesn't like speaking her native tongue with another Polish teacher because it alienates their colleagues), Leonie Benesch is so keyed-up she's practically an aesthetic unto herself. After a teacher is pickpocketed at school, presumably by a student, Ms. Nowak's first priority isn't to the faculty: She doesn't like that the kids are being encouraged to rat on their own and bristles at the racial profiling of one of her sixth-graders when he's singled out for having a large sum of money in his wallet. Later, she thinks she's caught the real thief on camera, long-time receptionist Ms. Kuhn (Eva Löbau), whose son Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch) is in her class. She confronts the woman in private with every intention of letting her off the hook, but she underestimates the gulf between them in terms of age vs. experience, perhaps, or teachers vs. clerical staff, or spinsterhood vs. working single-motherhood, and Ms. Kuhn's indignant reaction scorches the earth, forcing Ms. Nowak's hand. When Ms. Kuhn is put on leave, Oskar tries to pay his mother's tab with his meagre savings, but the debt, of course, has ballooned past any dollar amount. He demands she make some sort of retraction to clear his mother's name. Again, not that simple, and it probably wouldn't do any good, though he's adamant: "You will apologize in public or you'll suffer the consequences."

Telluride '23: Fallen Leaves

Kuolleet lehdet
***½/****
starring Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen, Janne Hyytiäinen, Nuppu Koivu
written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki

by Walter Chaw I adore Aki Kaurismäki, the deadpan, live-action Bill Plympton of Finland, who tells his small stories, little romances and tiny tragedies, with a style one might call rigid but that for me plays like the legacy of Fassbinder carried through into our dotage. (Mine and his, had he lived.) Kaurismäki's latest film, Fallen Leaves, reminds me a lot, in fact, of Fassbinder's winsome Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), about a young Tunisian immigrant who falls for an older cleaning lady in West Germany. Its story of star-crossed lovers, separated by culture and generation, race and creed, is presented with the kind of simplicity that's all the more emotionally lacerating for its reserve. Fassbinder's slow, mannered pace allows his actors to find their breath, to expand into the skins of their characters so that we register every minute change in expression, every tightening of the skin by the eye, every roll of the muscle in the jaw when a small slight lands like a blow. Kaurismäki's pictures engage in the same slowing-down, the same understated dialogue, the same complexity of emotion.

Telluride '23: The Royal Hotel

**½/****
starring Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, James Frecheville, Hugo Weaving
written by Kitty Green & Oscar Redding
directed by Kitty Green

by Walter Chaw Aussie hyphenate Kitty Green's follow-up to her superlative office horror The Assistant is The Royal Hotel, a lighter, distaff version of Wake in Fright in which two college girls looking for a little adventure but out of money find themselves in the Outback tending bar to a bunch of despicable degenerates. Hanna (Julia Garner) is the cautious one and Liv (Jessica Henwick) is the broken one, leading to a few uncomfortable scenes where Liv gets fall-down drunk while surrounded by a bunch of men who would most assuredly like to rape and murder her. Maybe not in the bright light of day, but a few dozen pints later all's fair in love and the poor decisions most of us somehow survive. For the record, I liked Hanna very much and loathed Liv, which is evidence of not only a profound empathy gap in me that stops me from caring about people who, by their damage, end up damaging those who've made themselves responsible for them, but also a script (by Green and Oscar Redding) that leans perhaps too heavily on the horror-movie dichotomy of good girl/party girl. What works so well about Wake in Fright is how its hero is both a respectable doctor and a drunken gambling addict with a sadistic streak. You hate him, but you hate everyone else a tiny bit more. Still, when he puts a gun to his temple, you hope he doesn't miss. Imagine the film now with a friend for the hero who is fully equipped with a working human warning system that no one will heed. It's distracting; it becomes a different movie when there's someone in it making sense.

Telluride '23: Poor Things

****/****
starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef
screenplay by Tony McNamara, based upon the novel by Alasdair Gray
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

by Walter Chaw Ex Machina by way of Anaïs Nin, Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things is a libertine exercise-cum-fable about the hypocrisies of politesse and the occasional eruptions of collective sexual hysteria designed exclusively for shackling women to proverbial bits and millstones. It is the final of three films in 2023 that use Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a launchpad for progressive genre explorations, locating in the novel's stitched-together creature a fulsome metaphor for the indignities afforded the spirit encased in prisons of rotting flesh. Rather than quibble about the merits of one over the other, watch all three (Bomani J. Story's The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Laura Moss's Birth/Rebirth being the other two) in any sequence to witness the unfolding of an extended treatise on gender and racial politics delivered with brio, invention, wicked intelligence, and bracing creative courage. It's possible to make a movie of a lecture, but it's more effective to make dangerous, even experimental, art from which all manner of lecture and examination will eventually be constructed. The former is the province of creators limited by their fear and ignorance, the latter of mad scientists inordinately confident in the ability of their cinematic children to find a way through the rubble of a drowned and ruined world. I don't know that these three films are the best three films of the year, but they're among them, and certainly, they comprise an uncanny trilogy for a period in which the United States has stripped women of their bodily autonomy at the moment of a suspiciously-timed rise in fascist white nationalism and its handmaiden, Puritanism. They're doing it in the open: raising a flag of moral panic waved by Evangelical fucknuts pushing hard for an Apocalypse they hope will consign everyone else on this burning Earth to a damnation born of their perverse, onanistic fetishism.

Telluride '23: Fingernails

½*/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Jeremy Allen White, Riz Ahmed, Luke Wilson
written by Christos Nikou, Stavros Raptis, Sam Steiner
directed by Christos Nikou

by Walter Chaw If you ever wondered what a tuneless Yorgos Lanthimos rip-off would look like, Christos Nikou's Fingernails has your answer. It's lifeless, pointless, idiosyncratic in the basic, formula-bound way non-idiosyncratic people imagine idiosyncrasy to be like, and it staggers around trying to make sense of its internal logic before it's too late--but it's too late. There's no plan here that makes sense, only a high concept that sounded smart one night and a trillion-dollar corporation desperate for something to fill the voracious maw of its content extruder. Fingernails is the stupid-person's version of Dogtooth, substituting an explicitly violent and sexual fable for the dangers of oppressive belief systems with a conspicuous nothing-burger that, not knowing what it's about or how to be about it, is predictably a dumpster fire that thinks it's about the indomitability of love yet in execution is about nothing. The movie has going for it three of the very finest actors working right now in Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, and Jeremy Allen White--and it has going against it a script that feels like a first draft, desperate direction, and a technical presentation that, at least in its festival incarnation, was marred with flaws that exacerbated the impression the film's brand is "undercooked." Everyone deserved better.

Telluride '23: Cassandro

*/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Roberta Colindrez, Perla de la Rosa, Raúl Castillo
written by David Teague & Roger Ross Williams
directed by Roger Ross Williams

by Walter Chaw Playing out as an exhausted vanity piece on the one side and an exhausted sports biopic on the other, Roger Ross Williams's Cassandro essays the life and early career of flamboyant, El Paso-based luchador Saúl Armendaríz, who, under his nom de guerre "Cassandro," became the first openly gay exóticos character in Mexican wrestling allowed to actually win matches. Armed with the "Mexico tint" coined by Steven Soderbergh in Traffic, a lot of Dutch angles, and an inexplicable 1.44:1 aspect ratio that makes everything seem like it was shot on an iPhone, Williams nudges the film along from one stale trope to the next like an old frog disinterestedly leaping across lilypads. There are flashbacks to Saúl's childhood in which his "really into Jesus" dad, Eduardo (Robert Salas), feeds him doughnuts, not knowing his son will one day be an emblem of the love that dare not speak its name; interludes with Saúl's figure-hugging-animal-print-dress-wearing mama Yocasta (Perla de la Rosa) that show her son to be a good boy; and then montages where Saúl trains with badass Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez) and starts climbing the Lucha Libre ranks. Cassandro, in other words, has nothing to say and doesn't say it with any particular innovation, either. What a shame.

Telluride '23: Pyrrhic Victories (An Introduction)

I imagine I can feel entropy sometimes, like the way you can imagine the sensation of being drained while you're donating blood. I feel myself piecemeal falling away to nothing, just the shape of what I used to be.

Feed My Frankenstein: FFC Interviews Laura Moss

Walter Chaw interviews Laura Moss, co-writer/director of BIRTH/REBIRTH

Laura Moss's Birth/Rebirth is the second of three distaff takes on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein set for release in 2023. As the United States reckons with a series of strikes, the loudest calls for labour reform in recent memory, these new reads of the novel, notable also for seizing on the social progressiveness of the text, seem of a piece with a cultural zeitgeist pointing towards the disruption of our ingrained systems. Grateful for the opportunities the festival success of Birth/Rebirth has afforded them, Moss is as intelligent and energetic in person as their work suggests, and insightful about their creative process. The film itself is fresh, ferocious, and uses David Cronenberg correctly in a sentence, too, so when I was given the opportunity to talk with Moss, I started by asking them about the horror of the flesh:

Roman Holiday (1953) [Centennial Collection] - DVD|[70th Anniversary] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***½/****
DVD - Image B- Sound B Extras C
4K UHD - Image B Sound A- Extras C+
starring Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert, Hartley Power
screenplay by Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton
directed by William Wyler

by Walter Chaw It's one of those seminal moments that movies provide the culture with now and again, like the swoop up a little rise to an impossibly fresh John Wayne in Stagecoach, or the intervention of a fortuitous steam vent in The Seven Year Itch, this introduction we have to Audrey Hepburn as she's whirled around in a barber chair in William Wyler's Roman Holiday to reveal the pixie-cut heard 'round the world. That she's adorable is a given--the real issue is whether she's an actress or just a bundle of inexplicable charisma, a ganglion of celluloid starlight that evaporates under the slightest critical scrutiny. I love Roman Holiday, but I vacillate between indifference and actual dislike of the rest of Hepburn's films. I don't find her winsome in Breakfast at Tiffany's, am irritated by her in Charade, think she's appallingly twee in Love in the Afternoon. She doesn't hold her own against Sean Connery in Robin and Marian and gets blown off the screen by Albert Finney, Alan Arkin, and Rex Harrison in Two for the Road, Wait Until Dark, and My Fair Lady, respectively. If you ask me, Audrey isn't an actress so much as someone you would like to have known and maybe had the opportunity to cuddle, which makes her mega-stardom in the Fifties and Sixties all the more testament to her ineffable appeal. Happening right when Method was rendering personalities like Hepburn déclassé, she was making a career of being terminally anachronistic. It's Ozzie's Harriet, sashaying while Rome burns. Instant nostalgia; even when she was introduced for the first time, it must have seemed like ages ago.

Fantasia Festival '23: Birth/Rebirth

****/****
starring Judy Reyes, Marin Ireland, AJ Lister, Breeda Wool
written by Laura Moss & Brendan O'Brien
directed by Laura Moss

by Walter Chaw In this year of the distaff Frankenstein riff, sandwiched between Bomani Story's exceptional The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Yorgos Lanthimos's upcoming Poor Things, find Laura Moss's fucking awesome Birth/Rebirth, which, like Story's film, manages to smuggle in a sharp, eloquently deployed payload of social and philosophical issues alongside just enough satisfying gore and a gratifying amount of real terror. I wonder if the key to the success of these films, Story's and Moss's, has to do with filmmakers who aren't white men taking their shot at interpreting what is and always has been an essentially, perhaps the essentially, progressive genre text--one authored by a woman, no less, the daughter of one of the most important figures in the early women's-rights movement, Mary Wollstonecraft (who published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and political philosopher/anarchist William Godwin. First-time readers of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein might be surprised by its political sensitivities--its critique of a carceral state in which there is no forgiveness, only the presumption of guilt based mainly on appearance and social status. By how the Monster's fate is predetermined as he's cast off to educate himself with pilfered books and shelter amongst others whom polite society has labelled "misfit" and "outcast." Frankenstein is a story of class war. Mary and her husband didn't even eat sugar because of its role in the Caribbean slave trade. The Monster says, "I heard of the division of property of immense wealth and squalid poverty of ranked dissent and noble blood." He was woke as fuck, and this was 1818.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

**½/****
starring Dracula, Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham
screenplay by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw I like André Øvredal movies. I liked Trollhunter, and I loved Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, along with most of The Autopsy of Jane Doe. They deliver exactly what they promise and do so with an at times striking sense of how to convey the poetry of the beginning of things. His movies feel like mythology, in a few cases are mythology. And like mythologies, they're earnest, direct, and deceptively simple in narrative but rich with subtext. He makes sense for a Dracula prequel--not a Vlad the Impaler creation story, but a picture extrapolated from the "Captain's Log" portion of the Bram Stoker novel that details, in just under 2000 words of the seventh chapter, the fate of the doomed freighter tasked with bringing Dracula's stuff over from Transylvania to England, whose crew became provisions for the grand fiend en route. Murnau's Nosferatu covered the voyage in a few swift, expressionistic strokes (coffin play, hilariously), allowing Øvredal's The Last Voyage of the Demeter to expand on the circumstances while paying homage to that film's character design. As played by Javier Botet, Øvredal's Dracula is barely humanoid at all.

Fantasia Festival '23: Pandemonium

***/****
starring Hugo Dillon, Arben Bajraktaraj, Manon Maindivide, Ophelia Kolb
written and directed by Quarxx

by Walter Chaw French multidisciplinary artist Quarxx's sophomore feature Pandemonium is relentless miserablism presented handsomely and with neither of the usual pressure valves of archness or irony. It's punishing. Although it doesn't share much in terms of approach or narrative with Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, they have a similarly slick surface, and it did make me feel uncomfortable in the same way. And, ultimately, almost as unhappy. Films like this--such as most of Lars von Trier's and Michael Haneke's respective filmographies--are generally provocations without much more on their mind than to upset expectation and a perceived general apathy, but Pandemonium did get me thinking about how I'm raising my kids, so there's that at least. I wonder if the function of the film-as-endurance-test isn't ultimately as a lens with which to focus one's empathy. That is, to say that for as lousy as your life feels at any given moment, it can and almost certainly will get worse. How consistently I enjoy movies that make me feel awful (and now I'm thinking of Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor, which made me feel bad for months--and topped my best-of list of that year) says something about our desire for confirmation bias, I suppose. I want to be reassured that my Hobbesian outlook is rational. I'm addicted to that reassurance.

Fantasia Festival '23: New Life

**½/****
starring Tony Amendola, Hayley Erin, Sonya Walger, Nick George
written and directed by John Rosman

by Walter Chaw I respect the directness and simplicity of John Rosman's New Life, the way it addresses a double-edged problem through two women in separate storylines who represent the point and counterpoint of a debate without an easy answer. How does one balance the individual good versus the interests of the collective? Easy enough to say that any individual must be sacrificed for the sake of society until one humanizes the individual. Plenty of films tackle this question: John Frankenheimer's The Train measures the value of a man's life against a priceless work of art; Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's extraordinary 28 Weeks Later and Breck Eisner's remake of The Crazies wonder how many people must be sacrificed for the greater good, no matter how heroic the lengths they've gone to survive. New Life's stakes are similarly big, although its focus is smaller--the "Trolley Problem" where one of the hero's choices is to kill a person she likes in order to save a planet full of strangers. Complicating it all is that the hero herself, Elsa (Sonya Walger), is afflicted with a progressive neurological disorder, meaning her time is limited regardless of what she chooses. If she does the difficult thing, in other words, she's not even doing it for herself.

Shortcomings (2023)

**/****
starring Justin H. Min, Sherry Cola, Ally Maki, Timothy Simons
written by Adrian Tomine, based on his graphic novel
directed by Randall Park

by Walter Chaw I feel about Randall Park's Shortcomings the same way I feel about Stephen Frears's High Fidelity (2000), in that they're both films I (would have) liked in my mid-twenties that I don't like in my early-fifties, now that the ardour of my sexual jealousy has waned in proportion to my increased confidence in myself and my marriage. Similarly, I see the angst of its essentially unlikeable hero as distasteful rather than relatable and not meaningfully salved by trenchant cultural observations or incisive insights or wit, what little there is of it. It's...a bit of a wallow in the company of a meanspirited, self-hating narcissist so self-destructive it's easy to lose empathy for the three women in his life he takes for granted, abuses, and otherwise exploits. He's a charisma vampire, sucking the energy out of every environment. He's a black hole--and like most black holes, his primary function is to suck. I'm aware that Woody Allen made an entire career out of ethnically sucking, but I'd offer that at least Woody, in his prime, was funny. A creep, maybe, but a funny creep.

Fantasia Festival '23: Sympathy for the Devil

½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joel Kinnaman, Kaiwi Lyman
screenplay by Luke Paradise
directed by Yuval Adler

by Walter Chaw A History of Violence for Dummies, Yuval Adler's slow-moving, never-ending Sympathy for the Devil is a Nicolas Cage vanity project in which America's slavering hambone tries on some kind of accent, a scarlet dye-job, and a half-assed high-concept that's familiar to everyone, it appears, except those responsible for carrying it off. Cage is The Passenger, a mysterious lunatic with a gun who carjacks father-to-be The Driver (Joel Kinnaman) in a hospital parking garage and forces him to drive down the Las Vegas strip to a neon-lit Edward Hopper bar where screaming fits can be engaged in for the bemusement of the easily bemused. "There he goes again," one might say of Cage as he bares his teeth, bangs on the table, flashes his eyes, and raises his voice. Lest one think he's merely punching the clock here, he's also listed as one of the producers, so I have to believe that phoning it in, all dials turned to "11," is the creative choice he's making at this point in his career. Cage can be an exceptional actor when he wants to be, don't get me wrong. I just wish he wanted to be more than once every ten years.

Fantasia Festival '23: Raging Grace

***½/****
starring Leanne Best, Jaeden Paige Boadilla, Max Eigenmann, David Hayman
written and directed by Paris Zarcilla

by Walter Chaw What sets something like Paris Zarcilla's Raging Grace apart from similar servant/master, immigrant/colonizer stuff like Lorcan Finnegan's Nocebo is how it offers glimpses of joy amid the suffering. We see a community at play and worship, united in song, celebrating one another, exultant and safe--at odds with how their oppression is generally centred in otherwise sympathetic texts. Jubilation, it turns out, is a useful tool to ratchet up the tension in a film about isolation and domestic enslavement. When you grasp what can be lost, the stakes become unbearably high. Raging Grace isn't a happy film, but there's happiness in it, starting with the hopefulness of its hero's name, Joy (Maxene Eigenmann). Joy's a homeless Filipino house cleaner on an expired visa to the UK struggling to care for her impetuous daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), on very little money and under the constant threat of discovery and deportation. The two survive by squatting in clients' homes while they're away, and Zarcilla has a lovely touch with the stolen days where mother and daughter pretend to have a place of their own. The rest of Joy's life is a hustle: to get more work, to hold onto existing work, to keep her kid entertained and hidden, and to try to leave the panic out of her voice when she talks to family she's left behind in the Philippines. Before Raging Grace becomes a horror film, it's already a horror film.

Fantasia Festival '23: Aporia

**½/****
starring Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi, Payman Maadi, Faithe Herman
written and directed by Jared Moshé

by Walter Chaw Titled after a word meaning "irresolvable internal contradiction," Aporia is a tragicomedy of errors à la The Butterfly Effect in which three well-meaning suburbanites figure out a way to change the past but can't quite figure out how to avoid causing unexpected temporal fuckups in addition to the ones they're trying to cause. For what it's worth, their always remembering their former timelines isn't addressed in any meaningful way--nor, I guess, does it need to be, given that this is soft sci-fi and not Primer, but I did think about it. I also thought about how the title is probably fair warning against trying to Neil deGrasse Tyson the thing, and so: fair enough. What happens is that grieving widow Sophie (Judy Greer), seven months out from losing husband Malcolm (Edi Gathegi) to a drunk driver, does her best to manage the trauma she and her daughter Riley (Gaithe Herman) are going through, but it's a losing battle. She confides in her friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) that things are spiralling, and Jabir tells Sophie that he and Malcolm had been working on a time-travel device that could fire a burst of energy to a specific time and place in the past. If they were to kill the drunk driver, they figure, maybe all would be well again in their world. So they do it, and at first it seems like this Monkey's Paw is one of the rare benevolent Monkey's Paws. But then Sophie starts feeling guilty over the financial plight the drunk driver's wife, Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), suffers in the absence of her lout of a husband.

Fantasia Festival '23: Vincent Must Die + Blackout

Vincent doit mourir
***½/****
starring Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, François Chattot, Karoline Rose Sun
written by Mathieu Naert
directed by Stéphan Castang

BLACKOUT
***½/****
starring Alex Hurt, Addison Timlin, Motell Gyn Foster, Barbara Crampton
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw I've been angrier lately, angrier than I ever remember feeling in my life--and I was a teenage boy once. I am either more keenly aware of how broken the world always was, or the world is more broken than it's ever been. Likely a little of both is true. I am frustration unrelieved. I am catharsis in eternal, trembling abeyance. The bad win and escape consequences; the good lose and lack the commitment to fight. The Earth is on fire, and only a handful of Scandinavian teens gluing themselves to paintings seem to have the will to do anything about it. I feel like I'm going to crack at every provocation, however minor or unintended. I wonder if I've lost my mind. It's the old man's fate to lament the growing incivility of every generation, but I didn't expect to have so much rage going into my sixth decade. I didn't expect to be the source of the incivility. I think the fallout from the cascading traumas of the last several years will continue to expose fault lines in our society for decades to come. Fallout is inevitable after an apocalypse, after all, and fault lines cause earthquakes. There's nothing special about us.

Barbie (2023)

*/****
starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Will Ferrell
written by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach
directed by Greta Gerwig

by Walter Chaw Margot Robbie is so good in good movies--and she's also in Greta Gerwig's smug, self-congratulatory, painfully obvious, subtext-free screed Barbie, playing Mattel's signature doll-for-girls, which, despite occasional attempts at empowerment, are still primarily thought of as regressive artifacts of a reductionist patriarchy. Does this review immediately sound like a didactic thesis more appropriate for a freshman-level gender-studies course? One that condescends to presume neither prior knowledge nor scholarship but rather hopes to build consensus through the most basic of shared sociological experiences, catchphrases, and facile platitudes? Well, fight fire with fire, I guess. It's tough to sit through populist groaners like Barbie because it's right about the wrongs it's angry about, but in the act of being right, it validates the criticisms of the worst people in the world--a strident preach to the choir that embitters the villains while actually showing those same incels, rapists, corporate stooges, and other clinically-twisted narcissists an uncomfortable amount of grace and mercy. I'm sympathetic, don't get me wrong. But while I think it's a long and rocky road to make something thorned and substantive out of a corporate icon under the supervision and financial control of said corporation, I'm of the mind that you might have been better off asking, say, Andrea Arnold to give it a go instead of Gerwig. Someone good, I mean. That is, if you were ever really serious about meaningful subversion as opposed to the stealth launch of your plastic-based cinematic universe using a name with a perplexing niche pedigree as the frictionless, candy-coated disguise for your rapacious intentions.

Oppenheimer (2023)

**½/****
starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw Stolid, classical in form, stately in a way some would say is boring yet so precisely parcelled out in perfectly measured, oppressively scored, bite-sized mic-drop morsels that it holds one's interest whether one is interested or not, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is indisputably well-made and certainly well-intended. If it's not entirely unlike an amalgam of A Beautiful Mind and The Imitation Game, well, there you have it. As Oppenheimer ploughs no new furrows in the biopic game, what's left to ponder is whether the story of the father of the atomic bomb is told with enough nuance and ambiguity to justify its declarative urgency, its...what is it? Self-satisfaction? Or, failing that, whether it has enough ticking-timebomb doomsday urgency to cut through the curtain of unjustifiably-pleased-with-itself-and-let-me-explain-to-you-why-with-an-unreasonable-amount-of-exposition that suffocates so much of Nolan's recent work. I mean, it's good, don't get me wrong, but it's neither novel nor mind-breaking--neither Mishima nor JFK. In the end, I'm not entirely convinced it's much more than strong yeoman's work bolstered by predictably fine performances from a prestigious cast hired to do what they always do.

After Hours (1985) [The Criterion Collection] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Combo

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Thomas Chong
written by Joseph Minion
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is an asshole. Let's get that out of the way. He's doing a shitty, half-assed job of training the new guy, Lloyd (Bronson Pinchot), in his daytime cubicle hell when Lloyd confesses that his dream isn't mastering the antiquated data-entry system at their non-descript job, but to start a publication where struggling writers might find an outlet for their work. Paul doesn't bother hiding his...not disdain, but complete disinterest in what Lloyd's saying, finding himself distracted by the romance of sheaves of financial documents being moved from one desk to another before standing up and walking away. Paul is detestable. He is The Company rep Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) from the next year's Aliens, the prototypical yuppie who shows up for a late-night booty call with a stranger in Soho wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt and tie. He is the American Psycho. Paul could give a shit about the voice of the oppressed looking for a creative outlet to contribute to the collective pool of art. He's all about numbers. He is the reincarnation of North by Northwest's unctuous, mercurial ad-man Roger O. Thornhill, whose monogram is "ROT." (The "O" stands for "nothing.") After Hours, much like North by Northwest, becomes a nightmare of commodification in which numbers are the source of dehumanization and disassociation. The only reason we really like Paul at all is that we can empathize with his desire to go to bed with 1985 Rosanna Arquette.

Fantasia Festival '23: Introduction

by Walter Chaw I love Fantasia Festival. More than love it, I think it's an important showcase that has provided at least a couple of titles that end up on my Best of the Year list every time I've covered it. Its programming is consistently on point, its courage to wade into deep and hostile waters laudable. This year, I'm most excited to catch Oh Dae-hwan and Jang Dong-yoon in Kim Jae-hoon's Face/Off-inspired debut, Devils, and Jimmy Laporal-Trésor's rise-of-fascism period piece, Rascals. Quarxx has a new flick inspired by Milton and Dante called Pandemonium, and there's a new '80s Satanic Panic documentary called Satan Wants You that dates me, I'll admit. A small part of me still believes I'll start speaking in Aramaic and crawling up the wall every time I spin an Iron Maiden vinyl. I feel a similar mix of nostalgia and dread about A Disturbance in the Force, which dives deep into what exactly was going through everyone's heads while making the "Star Wars Holiday Special".

The Truman Show (1998) [25th Anniversary] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Ed Harris
written by Andrew Niccol
directed by Peter Weir

by Walter Chaw The Truman Show appeared during a period when we were taking a hard look at how quickly and thoroughly we had given our lives over to technology, bracing for the Y2K bug to drop airplanes out of the sky and launch nuclear arsenals. The cruel irony of successfully averting disaster is that the morning after, having learned nothing, we redoubled our efforts to sell ourselves to our things. Introspection is like a nightmare upon waking: If it doesn't disappear on its own, you do your best to wave it away. Orwell's 1984 didn't predict how we pay subscriptions for the right to be surveilled constantly, every detail of our lives documented surreptitiously for corporate information harvesters and publicly through social media, where we manufacture the best versions of ourselves to entertain, and shame, others. We line up around city blocks for the right to plant the world's most sophisticated tracking devices on ourselves; there is a fundamental, exploitable flaw in our programming. We overestimated the extent to which we desired anonymity, underestimated our longing to matter and our vulnerability to flattery. Our will to power through influence, evolutionarily favoured, is the suicide pill encoded into our hardware. In our pursuit of a self to proliferate, technology allowed us to redraft our image and curate our environments. The films at the end of the millennium--Pleasantville, Dark City, The Matrix, and The Thirteenth Floor, to name a few--are warnings about what happens when we project our subjectivity upon the world. Perhaps none cautioned more definitively than Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich, which has the balls to literalize the horror of living among undifferentiated versions of the self in a simulation of the outside that is merely an interpretation of an eternity of insides.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

****/****
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw I've liked every film in this series to some extent, the last few very much. Yet, pressed, I couldn't tell you what any of them are about. If you ask me to recount the plot of this latest entry, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (hereafter Dead Reckoning), I would have a tough time only a few minutes out of the screening. This isn't an inherently bad thing. If you were to ask most people who've seen North by Northwest, they wouldn't know it's about microfilm being smuggled in South American figurines, just as they will not question whether a crop duster is the best way to kill someone waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn't remember that Notorious is about radioactive ore hidden in wine bottles, or that Psycho is about a petty embezzlement scheme. That's because it doesn't matter. You'd probably even get pushback about how that's not really what those films are about anyway, which is correct. Hitchcock called those things that matter a lot to everyone in the film--and almost nothing to anyone watching it--the "MacGuffin." The Mission: Impossible films are the quintessential modern example of an old concept: if you do everything well enough, if you understand how to keep things snappy and populate the story with characters who feel like real, live people (thus imbuing all the noise with stakes), well, it doesn't matter what the picture's about, because what it's actually about is so instantly relatable. Will they survive? Will they fall in love? Archetype and craft. There's nothing simpler and nothing more complex.

You Hurt My Feelings (2023) + No Hard Feelings (2023)

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS
**½/****
starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Jeannie Berlin
written and directed by Nicole Holofcener

NO HARD FEELINGS
***½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Laura Benanti, Matthew Broderick
written by Gene Stupnitsky & John Phillips
directed by Gene Stupnitsky

by Walter Chaw Nicole Holofcener's You Hurt My Feelings belongs, alongside stuff like Tamara Jenkins's Private Life and Lynn Shelton's Sword of Trust, to a very specific sub-genre of comedy. They're talky, WASP-y, verging on the cusp of self-awareness at all times without ever quite slopping over from solipsistic, and clearly courting an educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class (white) audience. I like them, for the most part, with their hangdog protagonists, weary of idiots and drowning in debt to therapists and assorted medical specialists--none of whom seem capable of solving their own existential blues, much less their clients'. I know that emotional quagmire. I've made maps of it. This is the playland to which Zach Braff and Alison Brie bring their gnarled cinematic projects as well, slumming them up in quotidian drag so that their appeals to melancholy ring hollow, manipulative, and self-serving. They lack authenticity; their troubles aren't lived-in but instead theoretical put-ons--the fake stories successful people tell at champagne brunches to appear afflicted by the same disappointments as you or me. You Hurt My Feelings doesn't feel natural, either, I have to say, although that's more to do with saturation than disingenuousness. I feel like I just saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus doing this in You People; I feel like indie comedies on indie budgets are all doing variations of the "talking in different found sets" thing. I feel like this is the third or fourth time this year I've been caught in a dense conversation with the same people complaining about the same problems in the same tone. It's that phenomenon where you try to give your baby a novel name, and when they reach school-age, it turns out everyone in their class is named the same thing.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

*/****
starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Antonio Banderas, Mads Mikkelsen
written by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp and James Mangold
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (hereafter Indy 5) is sad and tired. Some of that is on purpose, essaying a lonesome old man who has lost everything he cared about, is terrible at his day job, and is retiring in any case; and some of that is decidedly not on purpose, as the action sequences are simultaneously bloated and flaccid--pale imitations of past glories in a revered franchise whose first two installments are so extraordinary, it hardly matters it hasn't done anything great for three films now across almost 35 years. Indy 5 tries to infuse some life into itself with the addition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose Helena Shaw introduces herself as a young woman Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) knew at some indeterminate point in the past. Given that Indy's reunion with Marion (Karen Allen) in Raiders of the Lost Ark drops the nugget that she was likely a victim of statutory rape ("I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it"), I spent a few minutes wondering if Indy had molested a child Helena. But while Helena--the daughter of new character Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), the obvious replacement for Marcus Brody (the late Denholm Elliott)--remains blissfully clear of one of the darker intimations of the Indiana Jones character, she does function as a hollow doppelgänger for Marion, just as Basil is a hollow shade of Marcus. Meaning that for as bad as the de-aging effects are in this picture, its sparkless attempts to recapture some of the chemistry of the original films are somehow worse.

Superman: 5-Film Collection (1978-1987) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs

SUPERMAN (1978)
****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman and Robert Benton
directed by Richard Donner

SUPERMAN II (1981)
***/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN II - THE RICHARD DONNER CUT (2006)
***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN III (1983)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by David and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)
*½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras B
starring Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal
directed by Sidney J. Furie

by Walter Chaw The split in Superman--his faultline where he's the weakest, the most vulnerable to attack--is there from the beginning. He is a Zen kōan whose existence represents the essential riddle at the heart of any mythology for an infallible, omniscient, omnipotent being. He is an eggshell's impregnable yet permeable surface: incredibly strong and prone to shatter; seamless but filled with life; unknowably alien and a reflection of everyone's secret self. An incubator and vessel, the source and the end. He is the immovable object and the irresistible force, the "eternal boy scout," branded at various times by the terminally unempathetic as "boring"--the rejoinder to which is that he's been the centre of thousands of stories (tens of thousands?) in uninterrupted serialized adventures since his first appearance in Action Comics on April 18, 1938. Superman has persisted through every era of the United States from the Great Depression to now and every war since WWII, through the fall and rise again of the Ku Klux Klan and every form of mass media, in endless rejuvenating cycles bleeding into each other until their borders become a meaningless melange coalescing into a logo that is as archetypal in the West as the outline of a mushroom cloud. He is the literal "super" man, and somehow he means the most to the bullied and the broken--not as a fantasy of retribution, but as hopeful indication that even the most perfect of us are beset by doubt and alienation. He is the essential shining metaphor for post-modern existentialism.

The Flash (2023)

*½/****
starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Kiersey Clemons, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Christina Hodson
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Andy Muschietti's jittery, frenetic The Flash has about it the feeling of someone getting away with something. Some of that's extratextual, given the tribulations of its ingratiating star Ezra Miller, who went on a mini crime spree--caught on camera choking a female fan, accused of grooming/kidnapping an underage girl and exposing an infant to a firearm, and so on--and some of it is due to Miller's performance, by turns irritating and overblown, which again is either on purpose or just who Miller is. Lots has already been written about this movie being allowed to go forward under David Zaslav's anti-art reign over the storied Warner Bros. brand while other, largely minority-led films and television shows get vanished into the tax write-off cornfield. Even more has been written about the delays that greeted this tentpole as the studio waited for Miller's name to dissipate from the news cycle. Everyone has their redline, and I'm not equipped to judge people who won't watch a Roman Polanski film yet own the entire Led Zeppelin discography. Everyone has a blind eye, and we turn it according to personal instructions hypocritical, mercurial, and mysterious. It is what it is. I am of the belief, however, that only the bad guys burn books.

Elemental (2023)

****/****
screenplay by Peter Sohn & Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh
directed by Peter Sohn

by Walter Chaw I tell this tale over and over again as I see echoes of it pop up now in a landscape temporarily interested in the particulars of the immigrant story, but my parents came to the United States in the early '70s to complete their educations: my mother her Master's in Secondary Education, my father a Ph.D. in Geochemical Engineering. They settled in Golden, Colorado, in the cradle of the Rocky Mountains, after getting married at the Justice of the Peace, saying their vows phonetically and anglicizing our family name before my father really knew how to write in English--if you were ever wondering why it is my name is spelled "Chaw" when it was more common to go by "Chow" or "Cho" or "Chou." My dad, he did his best. Rather than teach or pursue a career in mineral mining or oil, he decided he wanted to be his own boss. His temperament, I think, made it hard for him to work for someone else. So he opened a rock shop in Golden, learned silversmithing, and made and repaired jewelry. I don't know if it was his dream to do this, but it's what he did for the rest of his life until the stress and misery of it killed him at 54. My mom was pulled into it with him but quit when he died. I disappointed them both long before that, changing my major from Biochemical Engineering to English long about the time I ran into Differential Equations freshman year. We were estranged until my wife insisted we invite them to our wedding. My wife is the angel of my better nature and guardian of the tatters of my soul.

Story Time: FFC Interviews Bomani J. Story

Walter Chaw interviews Bomani J. Story, writer-director of
THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MONSTER

I love writer-director Bomani J. Story's feature debut, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. I love it for its verve, its intimidating intelligence, its righteousness. It's one of the few Frankenstein adaptations that actually takes Mary Shelley's presence in the novel into consideration, serving as a very fine horror film on the one side and a sharp social commentary on the other. Story is the rare young filmmaker unafraid of subtext, and he has a genuine humility about him that, to me, is a predictor of future life success. He's said that going back to Frankenstein the book was, essentially, a bolt of lightning for him, and indeed, I think it takes a minority read of it to fully grasp its revolutionary quality. I was similarly galvanized my first time reading it, too. It probably, by itself, led to my interest in studying British Romanticism once upon a time.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

****/****
written by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham
directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

by Walter Chaw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is fucking spectacular. Taking the baton from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse's Oscar-winning team of Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, new co-directors Joaquim Don Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson have created something that feels like a chi-chi art gallery in uptown Manhattan, where geniuses who make things you can't believe you're seeing are all exhibiting their mind-blowing riffs on the same pop-cultural theme. I even thought of Peter Greenaway's work in how the characters have colour-coded costumes to exist in mood-specific settings that transition from one to the next at a dazzling, dizzying, breakneck pace. Every inch of Across the Spider-Verse is filled with light and detail without being overcrowded. It's a sensory amphetamine, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, yet somehow not exhausting. I sometimes forget why I ever loved superheroes and comic books, given the direness of the flavourless gruel parade masquerading as outsider art nowadays. Then along come Into the Spider-Verse and now Across the Spider-Verse to remind me how important these stories are when they're told in the voices of the oppressed rather than through the stock portfolios of the oppressors. In the hands of the people who are hurting, comic books can be and often are fantasies of hope. In the hands of the wealthy seeking to become wealthier, they're fantasies of exploitation, colonization, and fascism.

Flashdance (1983) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Jennifer Beals, Michael Nouri, Belinda Bauer, Lilia Skala
screenplay by Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Bill Chambers "FLASHDANCE." It's hardly a coincidence the Rocky movies started this way, with the title scrolling horizontally across the screen like a ring girl's sign for the upcoming round. Then we fade up on our heroine, mythologized via obscured features, cycling confidently through the city to the anthemic strains of the late Irene Cara's "Flashdance... What a Feeling"--a montage that riffs on the iconic opening titles of Saturday Night Fever. And that, in a nutshell, is Flashdance: Rocky meets Saturday Night Fever, albeit with a female lead and considerably less dramatic tension than either. It is perhaps more that referencing these pop-culture juggernauts at the outset establishes a vernacular, translating a movie for the masses that only half-heartedly yields to formula. Flashdance is weird with a beard. It's elliptical and largely free of plot, featuring a modern-day fairytale heroine navigating an urban jungle awash in mimes and breakdancers (but curiously few cars), which is captured voyeuristically with long lenses and natural light like cinéma vérité­­ on Mars.

The Little Mermaid (2023)

*/****
starring Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer-King, Daveed Diggs, Melissa McCarthy
screenplay by David Magee
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw I have long, disquieting thoughts about Ursula the Sea Witch's anatomy in the live-action version of Disney's The Little Mermaid. As I understand it, with octopi, the centre of their body cavity, ringed by tentacles, is a beak. Ursula is a mermaid whose top half is human and whose bottom half is octopus--but her face doesn't emerge from the centre of her ring of tentacles. Rather, the tentacles function as an expressive, sentient dress--like Dr. Strange's cloak, I suppose, if we're keeping it in the Disney family. This didn't bother me when Ursula was a cartoon of a drag queen, but it's bothering me now because it's Melissa McCarthy, and what the hell is happening down there? Nightmare fuel is what's happening down there. There's a moment during her big number where she, like Bruce Springsteen during his Super Bowl halftime show, teabags the camera--and, friends, I was craning to catch a glimpse. What did I imagine? A chthonic, Lovecraftian horror of luminous tentacles and vagina dentata in a horror film's ink-murk deep of shipwrecks and sharks. The scene where the title heroine, Ariel (Halle Bailey), goes to sell her voice to Ursula even begins with a hall of grasping pink "hands" springing from the walls. It's insinuating like one of the post-rape hallucinations from Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Is The Little Mermaid good? I have no idea how to answer that question.

Ghosted (2023) + The Mother (2023)

GHOSTED
ZERO STARS/****
starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Mike Moh, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Dexter Fletcher

THE MOTHER
**/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes
screenplay by Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw Two new entries in the woman-warrior subgenre of action pictures find a pretty abysmal knock-off of Knight and Day in the Ana de Armas vehicle Ghosted (with villain Adrien Brody doing a weird accent) and a pretty fair knock-off of Hanna in the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Mother (with villain Joseph Fiennes doing a different weird accent). The one is ultimately a half-assed romcom, the other a grim survivalist ex-military Stella Dallas melodrama. They share a queasy desperation, as well as a sense that they've lapped their respective sell-by dates by at least a full creative cycle. It's that feeling where you recognize someone at the party who hasn't been invited, and they know you know but no one wants to say anything. The best modern iterations of this kind of movie are Renny Harlin's The Long Kiss Goodnight and James Cameron's Aliens. I wonder if my overall fatigue with the genre isn't a product of my searching for those highs again in the intervening, largely disappointing decades. Part of me feels like I should celebrate non-IP attempts at mature actioners--but the rest of me feels like I'd rather be watching something that doesn't suck. It's the eternal struggle.

Air (2023)

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Viola Davis
written by Alex Convery
directed by Ben Affleck

by Walter Chaw The irony of a film celebrating the taking of chances being so absolutely afraid to take any chances is so conspicuous it feels a little like bullying to point it out, but here goes: Ben Affleck's Air is the flabby, out-of-shape version of Moneyball, aspiring only to appease the narcissists it essays and the billion-dollar corporations with which they have developed disturbing symbiotic relationships. It's not boring, exactly, though it is like that story your grandfather has told you a dozen times already: you listen patiently for the climax you know is coming in order to time your surprise and delight appropriately. Some movies in this vein, like Miracle, are pretty good. Others, like Hoosiers, are pretty awful. All of them are watchable pabulum, pre-chewed and partially digested. It goes down without much swallowing and goes out without much noise--and every six months, there's another one. Interviews with Affleck and his muse Matt Damon have found them breathlessly recounting how scripter Alex Convery was watching an ESPN "30 on 30" documentary when he had the "eureka" that the story of Nike guy Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) would "make a great movie!" An uncredited rewrite by Affleck/Damon incorporated notes from roundball legend Michael Jordan hissownself, elevating the roles his mother, Deloris (Viola Davis, whom Jordan cast), and Olympics coach George Raveling (Marlon Wayans) played in Jordan's decision to sign a sponsorship deal with Nike. Et voilà! Not a "great movie," let's say, but definitely a movie.

Hot Docs '23: All You See

***½/****
directed by Niki Padidar

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Iran-born, Netherlands-based director Niki Padidar's All You See isolates its three female interview subjects in small, sparsely-dressed rooms with no fourth wall, shooting them head-on in centre-framed compositions that meet at some nexus of Wes Anderson and Errol Morris. (For her part, Padidar has cited "all Charlie Kaufman films" and Lars von Trier's Dogville as key influences on the picture's design.) From inside these cubicles, the interviewees primarily reflect on how people in their adoptive country of Holland respond to them as immigrants. Consider this staging a kind of lo-fi expressionism, then, manifesting their feelings of being under interrogation while also highlighting their exoticism, which is somewhat invisible outside its cultural context. Or is it? It seems naïve to think this movie is about a xenophobia specific to the Netherlands, no matter the notoriety of Dutch racism (e.g., Zwarte Piet) or how superior the enlightened viewer might feel to these ladies' offscreen tormentors. Beyond its formal daring, the uniqueness of All You See is that it delves into a rarely explored aspect of the immigrant experience likely to resonate with anyone whose conspicuous presence disrupts cultural homogeneity.

Hot Docs '23: Food and Country

**/****
directed by Laura Gabbert

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda "I've spent my whole life working on this project," NEW YORK TIMES food critic and memoirist Ruth Reichl says late in Laura Gabbert's Food and Country, a well-researched but muddled look at the changing nature of food in America that considers how an already precarious food system buckled under the additional weight of COVID in the early months of 2020. Reichl's statement is one of many big promises not quite fulfilled by Gabbert's tentative approach to her subject, which is also hazily defined: at various points, it's either Reichl's research or the author herself. The result is an amiably rambling but overcooked, arms-length essay--partly Reichl's and partly Gabbert's--about no less than three major topics: Reichl's biography in food writing; the state of corporate agriculture and farming in America, which stiffs farmers and shoppers alike and benefits only four major packing conglomerates; and the myriad ways in which the early days of the pandemic caused irreparable damage to both restaurateurs and their providers.