In a small cabin within a stark mountain vastness, a fire blazing, a group of native people, Quechuans, are praying and singing while a young man, Leo, dons the beautiful costume of a traditional Andean musician. He’s leaving for the town of Iquitos to work a manual labor job while hopefully also making money playing music with local groups. Among those gathered we see a young woman, Georgina, who is in the late stages of pregnancy. She is Leo’s wife, and is going with him to Iquitos to work. In the windy morning they climb the steep hill leaving home, the black and white photography and the spare, almost abstract landscape making this all look like a fearful dream.

After reaching the town, Leo works in a warehouse, while Georgina sits on a street corner selling potatoes that have been assigned to them by Leo’s bosses. It’s a difficult adjustment, where they have to speak Spanish to get by, which they don’t know that well, instead of their indigenous language Quechua. They don’t usually get to see each other until the night time.

One day, Georgina hears an announcement on the radio. There is a free clinic in Lima that will provide childbirth care and delivery. Experiencing the beginning of labor pains, she takes the 2-hour bus ride, alone, to the address given on the radio. The austere looking clinic is in one room of a large, official looking building. Georgina is there coached through a difficult childbirth. “It’s a girl,” they say, and then the mother loses consciousness. When she awakens later and asks for her baby, they say she’s in the hospital. The next day, despite her frantic requests to see her child, they drag her out of the clinic and lock the door. In the coming days she will return, eventually with Leo, and keep banging on the door. No one answers.

It takes some time before Georgina can grasp the terrible truth that her baby has been stolen. At the police station, they shrug their shoulders and say they can do nothing. Georgina’s grief is conveyed in heart rending fashion by first-time actress Pamela Mendoza, whose intense determination and emotion carries the film. Eventually she goes to one of the Lima newspapers, and a young, very serious reporter played by Tommy Párraga, decides to investigate. The movie then explores his experience, as a member of the press, of Peru’s social and political malaise.

One notices immediately that León’s style is not at all traditional. She’s committed to an expressionism that magnifies the feelings of her characters, and her visual strategies are daring. The story is based on a real case from that time, with implications far wider than this one woman. The combination of the “solving a mystery” type story with the avant-garde visual technique is spellbinding.

Without reservation, I’ll say this is a great film that has not become as well known as it should be. And the profound meaning of the title, Song Without a Name, is eventually revealed, to devastating effect.

This could have just been made into a concert film, which considering the quality of the sound and image, would have been fine. But veteran director Kevin Macdonald, famed for his innovative documentaries, is the leading creative spark behind this movie, and he decided to use the concert as a kind of focal point for that brief tumultuous period in America, 1971 and ‘72, when John & Yoko first moved to New York and became part of a vital artistic and political scene there.

We open with Lennon’s rocker “New York City,” in a dynamic performance with his band at the time, Elephant’s Memory. Interwoven with the songs, which include breathtaking versions of Instant Karma, Imagine and Mother, is a fascinating collection of footage and audio excerpts from that period. Macdonald’s starting point is John & Yoko’s moving into a Greenwich Village apartment in 1971, where they would spend a lot of time watching TV. A collage of amusing TV ads and parts of various shows of that time is accompanied by news clips of a nation going through some difficult changes.

We see that the Vietnam War was still raging. We watch coverage of the uprising at Attica State Prison in ’71, about which Lennon wrote a song. In contrast to the countercultural movement, we see lots of Richard Nixon and his campaign for reelection in ’72, and George Wallace running for president again, and getting shot, and too many other events to mention. Macdonald’s tapestry includes the great and the trivial, and there are funny excerpts from phone calls between John, Yoko, and various other people in their lives. It’s a fiercely evocative portrait, both joyous and sad in retrospect, of this remarkable time.

In leaving the Beatles, John sought to discover who he really was, unimaginable fame having sort of frozen him into a life that didn’t feel free. Yoko Ono wasn’t just someone he fell in love with. She was an experimental artist, part of a vibrant avant-garde movement that awakened something in Lennon that felt to him like a new birth. His awareness became radical, and in Yoko he found a partner that could see him and help him realize his potential.

One to One: John & Yoko is essential viewing for those who want to get to know the power of these two amazing people, and to reckon with a time when millions were crying out to just give peace a chance.

We first meet the Paiva family, Rubens, Eunice, and their children, enjoying life in their home near the beach in Rio de Janeiro. Rubens, played by Selton Mello is a former congressman who was forced to resign after the 1964 military coup. The couple has four girls, the oldest being 17, and one boy, the youngest child. It’s a boisterous home atmosphere, with parties and games and some humorous teasing.

The first real sign of trouble occurs when Vera, the 17-year-old, is in a car with friends when they come to a police roadblock where they are ordered out of the car and handled roughly. The cops are looking for suspects in a recent kidnapping of a foreign diplomat.

It’s not clear what Rubens does for a living now, exactly—something in the civil service. His friends are people who opposed the coup, many working as journalists. Rubens sometimes receives mysterious letters in manila envelopes. Clearly he’s still politically involved, in some low-key fashion. When his daughter Vera is given a chance to leave Brazil and study in London, he gladly lets her.

The film now largely takes the point of view of his wife Eunice, showing her capable and loving management of the family, and after we get to know her interesting mind and reliable character, she takes center stage in the film. She knows nothing about any political activity by her husband, which as it turns out was intentional. Eunice is played by Fernanda Torres. This is one of those happy occasions when a single actor can hold a movie together with a totally grounded performance of emotional honesty. Her Golden Globe award and Oscar nomination were fully deserved.

One winter’s day, some armed men in plainclothes come to the house and order Rubens to come with them and make a deposition. He drives away with one of them, and Eunice is left trying to calm the children. The men say that he will be back soon. But after a couple days, she makes inquiries about her husband’s whereabouts, and they bring her in for questioning along with her 15-year-old daughter, which is an effective way of striking fear into a parent’s heart. The daughter is released after a day, but Eunice is thrown into a cell for twelve days, and interrogated about people she saw visiting her home.

The film then settles in to a vivid portrayal of Eunice’s state of mind, as her husband fails to come home, day after day. It’s perpetual mental and emotional torture, when a loved one has been “disappeared” without a trace. This mother manages to protect and sustain her children through this terrible ordeal, and fight for the truth. Salles is paying tribute to the survivors through the story of this heroic woman, Eunice Paiva. The title, I’m Still Here, is a cry of defiance. You cannot kill our joy.

What we’ve just been watching is not the story, after all, but a scene from an unfinished movie that was shot in 1990, entitled “The Farewell Gaze.” The actor playing the hired detective in “The Farewell Gaze” was one of Spain’s major movie starts, Julio Arenas. But after shooting a few scenes, Arenas walked off the set and disappeared. No body was ever found, although it’s rumored that he jumped off a cliff into the sea.

Cut to 22 years later, in 2012: the director of “The Farewell Gaze,” Miguel Garay, played by Manolo Solo, is still haunted by what happened to his friend. Arenas’ disappearance was also a reason that Garay stopped making movies. Now an “Unsolved Mysteries” type TV show offers to help him find the truth. Why did Arenas vanish? Is he alive somewhere? From here on, the film is about Garay’s search for his friend, but he also takes a journey through his past, and the people who were important to him as a man and a filmmaker.

The fragility of memory is a fit subject for the 83-year-old Erice. With just four features in fifty years, plus a few shorter films, his work has been out of the ordinary. He has a commitment to cinema based on it as an experience and not as a commodity or a diversion. Realism is at one with metaphor in his films. All the ideas and references in this movie tie together into a many-faceted visual form.

Solo plays our central character with a gravely calm stoicism. He is ready to face the mystery of the other, whatever it might mean. In the role of Arenas, Coronado is a captivating and inscrutable presence, a complicated figure who seems to have stepped beyond his own mortality. I suppose I should mention that all of this is fiction: the film, the film within the film, the characters in each. But part of Erice’s greatness is that he doesn’t consider fiction and nonfiction as valid categories. The experience in his cinema is never untrue—there are always the possibilities of perceiving the truth in our lives.

Here, Erice is mining the recognition that movies can show us long-dead people as if they were still with us. Close Your Eyes thus looks back on life with the calm closed eyes of death. It’s a mournful and beguiling meditation on the merging of life and film. We’re in the hands of a master throughout.

Iman, played by Missagh Zareh, is a mid-level state employee who gets promoted to a more lucrative position as an investigative judge. When he tells his wife about the promotion, they share a feeling of excitement because it will mean possible state housing and further advancement. But when he goes to work, he’s dismayed to find that he’s expected to sign off on death sentences without bothering to read the file. The person who preceded him in the job was fired for refusing. He must also conceal everything he does from his family and friends, and is given a gun, ostensibly for self-defense. His promotion occurred just as the protests were gaining in strength, so the fear is that the protesters could put his picture and personal information on social media if he’s found out.

Rasoulof’s brilliant idea here is to dramatize the atmosphere during the unrest by focusing on this one man’s family, a devout and basically decent man whose decision to comply profoundly affects his relationship to his wife and two daughters. Najma, his wife, played by the remarkable Soheila Golestani staunchly supports her husband and the Iranian government, and complains to her daughters when they express more liberal attitudes. The elder daughter Rezvan, played by Mahsa Rostami is a young adult going to college but living at home. Sana (Setareh Maleki) is a teenager. Both are far more interested in the culture of their friends than their conservative family, with Sana even expressing the wish to dye her hair blue. But when a college friend of Rezvan needs help after being shot at a protest, this poses a grave problem for the daughters and especially the mother. Because, as we discover, Najma may be conventional, but she also has a heart, and loves her daughters enough to hide some things from their father.

There is much more to come, and the tense situations increase. Interspersed with the personal drama, Rasoulof  shows us startling footage of the demonstrations taken by phone cameras. Iranian women were yelling “No” to theocratic oppression, and in the face of a deadly backlash. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a symbolic title using the image of a certain species of fig tree native to Iran, Ficus Religiosa, that wraps its roots around other trees to strangle them in order to thrive, just as the religious government strangles freedom. The picture was shot in secret. Rasoulof was sentenced to a whipping, a fine, and eight years in prison. He escaped to safety in Germany. The three main actresses also fled the country. It’s hard to know how to adequately praise The Seed of the Sacred Fig. It’s beautiful on its own as a film, but it’s also a significant political statement.

Michael Fassbender plays a talented intelligence agent, something right in the actor’s skill range, as you can see from many of his films. He’s told by one of his higher up contacts in the agency that there’s a mole, a double agent, in his section—and the kicker is that his wife, also a spy, played by Cate Blanchett, is one of the suspects. There are four others, two women and two men. They all work together and know each other. Fassbender’s character, George Woodhouse, decides to expose who the traitor is through a series of games, verbal tests, and covert acts of surveillance.

Tom Burke and Naomie Harris are particularly fun as two of the spy suspects. Pierce Brosnan is on board in a grizzled old hand role as the agency section head. But the real star is—the script, by veteran screenwriter David Koepp. Koepp has worked with Soderbergh twice before, a director that allows him freedom to let loose. Black Bag is a film of surprising and witty dialogue. A lot of the scenes are just the characters talking back and forth in repartee fast enough to make your head spin. It has been dutifully promoted and reviewed as a thriller, but it’s really a game or a puzzle film, in which the story is a way of casually putting its seven principal characters through a conversational gauntlet where we (along with Woodhouse) try to figure out who’s telling the truth.

The MacGuffin is some kind of deadly software program called Severus, that the turncoat is trying to sell to Russia. Now, if you haven’t caught my drift yet, I’ll just say it: Soderbergh is playing with the idea of the spy film, making it a clever game, instead of trying to be, you know, realistic. We don’t know what this intelligence agency is, although it’s British, apparently. Kathryn, Cate Blanchett’s character, is a bundle of mysterious female espionage tropes from a host of movies, not a feasible real person. The same goes for everyone else, and especially Fassbender’s nerdy, intensely cerebral George, with his perfect memory and analytical skills.

Am I saying that Soderbergh is satirizing spy films? No. He loves them far too much for parody. He’s employing the spy film genre to have fun, and he and Koepp are employing it to also depict these important glamorous people, “big shots,” indulging in torrents of cynical devious wisecracks about each other. The movie doesn’t aim for stupendous. It’s too modest for that. In any case, there’s a particular pleasure to be had from trying to solve a very complex puzzle. Black Bag generously provides that pleasure.

Bob Montagné, played by Roger Duchesne, an aging gambler who has previously done time for bank robbery, runs into a streak of very bad luck at the tables. To avoid financial ruin he puts together a team of criminals, and devises a plan to rob the Deauville casino. Although the story is inspired by John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Bob Le Flambeur is remarkable for being almost entirely concerned with atmosphere more than plot. We are introduced first to the streets and nightclubs of Montmartre. We are then made gradually familiar with Bob’s strange lifestyle—traveling about to different card and craps games throughout the night, until he comes home to sleep at 6 A.M.—and his various eccentric and seedy acquaintances.

It’s only after quite some time that anything resembling a story starts to take shape. Even then, Melville lingers over the details of the characters’ rooms, or their casual conversation, while the heist plot develops in what seems an almost throwaway manner. Seeing it now, long after the French “New Wave” that followed in the 1960s, we are more familiar with such methods, but in 1956 this must have seemed very different indeed. In fact, Melville’s elliptical camerawork and staccato editing were a strong influence on the New Wave, as well as his playful sense of homage to other films.

The white-haired, somewhat portly Duchesne plays the part of Bob as if he were living it, with a slightly weary air and a sense of complete comfort and familiarity with the nocturnal world of the gambler. One of the film’s charms is that all the characters seem a bit “off”—Bob’s nephew and protégé (played by Daniel Gauchy) seems more like a goofy kid than a tough guy, and the girl (Isabelle Cory) that Bob takes under his wing (and secretly wants, although she sleeps with the nephew) is scarily self-possessed, yet somehow vacant as well.

It’s as if Melville wanted to see how the characters in a film noir might actually behave, with all the stretches of ordinary time and events that a Hollywood film would leave out. It’s kind of a bizarre idea, and the picture has an odd, laconic rhythm that takes some getting used to. Even the ending, which features an ingenious and amusing plot twist that ties all the themes together by a single stroke, is depicted without dramatic emphasis, as a momentary, flippant irony. Although Bob le Flambeur tells the story of an older man reaching the end of his rope, it’s really a youthful film—brash, experimental, perhaps a bit too cocky for its own good, but with a style still fresh and novel, after all these years.

Basel Adra is a young Palestinian activist from Massafer Yata, a group of ancient villages in the mountains of the southern West Bank. We learn in voice-over how as a child he saw his father protesting the treatment of his community by the Israeli Army. In 2002, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that the Army was allowed to destroy these villages, expel their inhabitants, and turn the land into a military training area. A series of lengthy legal battles staved off the threat, but in 2018, the army finally got past the challenges and began its work in earnest. Basel started filming the soldiers and their interactions with the protesting villagers, at some personal risk, and then hiding the footage in safe keeping.

In 2019 he befriended a young Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham, who started covering the story as an ally. They decided, along with two others—a Palestinian cinematographer and an Israeli one—to document the events in a film. It was an arduous five-year task, showing, as clearly as one could desire, the nature of what the Israeli government is doing. We see the soldiers arrive, tell people they have to leave their homes, that they’re on the army’s land, while the villagers yell and get pushed down and threatened with guns. Then bulldozers destroy a home, with residents only able to grab whatever belongings they can carry.

Palestinians have lived on this land for centuries. After the demolitions, the people retreat to sparsely furnished underground caves, where they make do until the army leaves, and then return above ground and start rebuilding at night. No Other Land shows us week after week, year after year, this agonizing destruction of their homes, and their children’s school. The protests sometimes lead to shootings of unarmed people—one young man is paralyzed from the neck down after being shot.

In counterpoint to this constantly stressful situation, the film gives us some quiet moments with people sharing their experiences, and a deepening friendship between Basel and Yuval. They’re able to be brutally honest with one another. Basel emphasizes how Yuval can drive to his home in Israel without hindrance, while he is forced to stay under the occupation.

The effect of all this footage showing directly the cruelty and barbaric behavior of the army, and the Israeli settlers who come in masks with their guns and clubs to expel people and take all the stolen land for themselves, has a devastating effect. We get to see firsthand what in fact had been going on for decades. The excuses that justify the settlements, and claim legitimacy for an apartheid system, fall apart when you see the events up close. No Other Land is a milestone in our understanding of the urgent need for Palestinian liberation.

The versatile Polish director and screenwriter Agnieszka Holland has been a filmmaker for almost 55 years. She’s continued to be a presence in world cinema, but I admit I didn’t expect her to make her greatest film at the age of 75. I’m talking about her most recent work: Green Border, a terrific drama about the struggle of migrants and refugees to seek a new home in Europe.

The “green border” is a nickname for the thick forests that span the border between Poland and Belarus. In 2021, a Syrian family—parents, three children, and a grandfather—have taken an opportunity offered by a relative to fly to Minsk, in Belarus. They are picked up by a truck that is supposed to take them to Poland, where they will meet someone assigned to get them to Sweden, a country that accepts Syrian refugees. The truck driver, however, stops at a checkpoint, demands money, and then drops them off in the forest in Poland. Thus begins a nightmare in which Polish border guards capture them and put them back in Belarus, only for them to be forced across the border again by Belarusian troops, with the cycle repeating over and over.

In a brief shot at the beginning of the film, we see the bright green forest from the air, after which the picture switches to black and white for the duration, like a transition from hope to suffering and despair. I must say, first of all, that if you don’t want to be upset, and horrified, don’t watch Green Border, or rather watch it some time when you’re willing to endure the stress for the sake of a deeper understanding.

The fear and confusion of a family, trying to protect their kids, being thrust into a seemingly endless wilderness is vivid enough, but the terrible cruelty and abuse of the border guards on either side raises the tension level to an almost unbearable extreme. It’s all based on actual events on this border, in which neither government wanted to help refugees, but instead beat and terrorized them, giving them nowhere to go, and nothing to do but die. This is not a unique story either, but a shamefully common one that we’ve witnessed on many borders, including our own.

In the second part of the film, we follow the Polish border guards, mostly from the perspective of a single young officer who participates in the general cruelty as part of his job, but grows more alienated from what he’s doing as time goes on. Part Three concerns “the activists”: young Poles who go into the forest to bring food, clothes, and medicine to the refugees. The fourth and final part of the film is called “Julia,” about a psychologist, played by Maja Ostaszewska, who has not paid much attention to politics, but gets an awakening when she hears a call for help from a refugee. Then we witness her evolution into a member of the resistance.

The acting, and the coordination of so many characters within a complex realistic story, is superb. We feel the raw emotion, the fear and rage and grief, of the people caught in this trap. The overwhelming conviction one gets from this movie is that a fixation on borders, even to the point of leaving people to die of starvation, thirst, and violence, is absolutely evil. As intense as Green Border is, its message is not finally a despairing one. We see that goodness still exists in the human heart, and we know that despite all the crime and injustice, there are still people willing to put everything on the line to help others.

For the last two decades, whenever we needed films confronting the urgent predicaments of our century—abrasive, fearless, uncompromising films—Romanian cinema has delivered them. It seems perhaps that the chaotic social landscape emerging after the overthrow of a dictator was an artistic breeding ground for fierce honesty and satire. The most recent Romanian director to emerge to some fame is Radu Jude, whose latest film is dark and defiant on a level rarely seen nowadays. It’s entitled Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

In the main part of the story, we’re in black & white, following Angela, played by Ilinca Manolache, a woman driving feverishly through Bucharest, chewing bubble gum. Pretty soon we see that she’s some kind of production assistant on a work safety film, assigned to video a series of possible candidates to tell stories of getting injured on the job. In every case, the victim’s workplace was unsafe because of neglect by the boss, but the Austrian company making the film just wants them to tell people to wear helmets and obey safety precautions.

There’s a deadline for meeting the Austrian CEO next day, so Angela is told she can’t stop working even though she hasn’t slept in ages. So she keeps going, and for much of the film Jude shows her from the passenger side view, driving on and on, until the exhaustion and noise of the city she’s passing by become overwhelming. She’s tough and cynical, and she has a side hustle, using a facial distortion app to play a bald, foul-mouthed misogynist troll in TikTok videos. It’s hard not to laugh at these profane videos, which are actually in-your-face parodies of contemporary male culture.

Then, strangely, another movie starts, which even includes opening credits, and this one’s in color. It concerns a taxi driver, also named Angela, and it looks exactly like it was filmed some time in the 1970s. The story in this color film is set during the Ceaușescu dictatorship, the repression and emotional frigidity of the movie and its performances are a stark contrast to the all-too expressive current story that we’ve been following. But there’s a hint of something more subversive in its dry humor.

These two stories keep going back and forth until eventually, when we’re back in the black & white film, Angela the young assistant runs into the taxi driver Angela, who looks like the same actress forty years later. And that’s when it occurred to me that Jude must have gotten permission to use clips from an older film—and indeed, as I discovered, it’s from Angela Moves On, directed by Lucian Bratu in 1981. Jude puts them in this movie, along with the same actress, Dorina Lazar, playing the character years later.

As we follow young Angela driving relentlessly on her way, we get the almost visceral experience of the absurd vulgarities of modern life with its social media quick fixes and overhyped interactions. This is fearless, outrageous, and funny filmmaking. But wait, there’s a Part 2. We see the real time depiction of what all this hustle ends up creating. A family is being coached to say the right thing for the work safety video, but not anything that would embarrass the company. This part isn’t meant to be fun. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World gives the middle finger to big corporate culture, and right now, we need that.

Paul B. Preciado is a Spanish author, philosopher, and transgender man, whose work includes studies of identity, sexuality, and feminism. But when a small French film company suggested he participate in a movie about his own complicated history as a nonbinary and trans person, he decided that it wasn’t enough to tell his story, as interesting as it might be. Something greater was needed, something evoking the variety and difference within trans lives. He thought of his favorite novel, “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf, from 1928, which tells of a man, his life spanning over a few centuries, who wakes up in the middle of the story as a woman. The English novelist was exploring the fluidity of gender before there were even proper terms for it. Preciado, who has never made a film before, wrote and directed a cinematic essay and manifesto called Orlando: My Political Biography.

Transgender people have been much in the news lately, unfortunately because opportunists have used fear and hostility to scapegoat and persecute them in order to enforce their notions of gender and sex. A regular documentary would study and investigate the subject, stating facts, evaluating conditions, and so on. And there probably are useful films out there that perform that service. But Precadio wants to give us the view from the inside, communicate as much as possible the thoughts and experiences of nonbinary and trans people. To that end he uses costumes, music, poetry, monologue, and scenes of struggles that many face.

Over twenty different transgender people, most of them non-professional actors, play different versions of Orlando, the novel’s main character. The plot is only roughly sketched. The film, mostly in French, offers many kinds of talk: personal, historical, philosophical of course, and political, centered on the awareness of a nonbinary self-nature. We hear Preciado talking in voice-over about his experience, sometimes directly addressing Woolf herself, while the actors read passages from the book and also talk about their lives. The director believes that Woolf was realizing a non-binary point of view, but there are better possibilities to explore than she was able to do a hundred years ago.

Social barriers are confronted and satirized. We witness the inevitable encounter of young trans people with psychiatrists, whose general incomprehension is set off by the self-aware comments of their patients. Some people who underwent surgical transition talk about that process. Preciado plays with period costume in a kind of classical punk aesthetic, and we can sometimes see the backstage work going into the movie we’re watching. There’s a sense of joy and homecoming that is conveyed here. Preciado places his characters in beautiful natural settings, defeating the dominant narrative that pretends they are unnatural.

Shot on a shoestring, the film is finely composed—the richness of Preciado’s text conveys truths we may never have realized from a mere documentary approach. Nonbinary, we learn, does not mean another sexual identity. It is the recognition that gender is socially invented and that the traits of our humanity are not part of what he calls the “regime of sexual difference.” Orlando: a Political Biography is a film of poetry and unexpected insights.

Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citerella).In the titular Argentine city, a young botanist goes missing while investigating a story revealed in some old love letters she’s discovered. Her boyfriend and another man go searching for her, but her search takes a strange new turn. Citerella first explores the mysteries we can solve, then the mysteries that are beyond what we can fully know. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez).An incisive documentary from Belgium, exposing how the U.S. and the European powers subverted the newly independent nation of Congo in 1960, which resulted in the assassination of its leader, Patrice Lumumba. The “soundtrack” is the American jazz of the period, which reflected the African American civil rights struggle, but was co-opted by the CIA in the name of cultural friendship. A brilliant achievement. And now for the “B-sides”:Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude) Youth {Spring} (Wang Bing) Here (Bas Devos)One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve) The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez) Mami Wata (C.J. “Fiery” Obasi) All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia) Rewind & Play (Alain Gomis) The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols) Origin (Ava DuVernay)Another revolution around the sun. May your year be full of courage, and your movie-watching full of joy.

A baker, played by Raimu (I love this old French tradition of single name movie stars) moves to a little village and opens an establishment, replacing a previous bakery considered unsatisfactory by local residents. He has a young pretty wife (Ginette Leclerc) who draws a lot of attention. She appears to be at least twenty years younger than her husband, perhaps more. On the first day of the new business, Aurélie (the wife) sees a handsome local shepherd whom she instantly falls for. That night, she runs away with him.

The unusual idea here is that when the baker wakes up to find her gone, he refuses to believe that she has left him. Eventually it becomes clear that he loves her so much that he can’t bear to even think bad things about her. Evidence accumulates from all the nosy neighbors about what has really happened, but he finds ever more ingenious (and funny) reasons not to believe. In many ways he’s a fool, but his loyalty to Aurélie is unshakeable. He is a cuckold who can’t and won’t see his cuckolded condition.

This central situation is simple enough, but the treatment becomes increasingly elaborate. Pagnol takes a sharp view of the villagers, who indulge in gossip and voice negative judgments of the wife. The local priest is a conceited and repellent phony sucking up to the aristocratic town landlord despite the Marquis keeping four young women on his estate that he pretends are his nieces. The villagers are exhorted to help the new baker by searching the countryside for his wife, but some of them just get drunk and they all fail to be of help. One old man is incapable of conveying information without adding a multitude of irrelevant details, and it’s hilarious.

Above all, there is Raimu, a beloved actor at the top of his game. Love, satire, despair, drunkenness, poetic utterance: he does it all. I was continually surprised at how far Pagnol was willing to go in his depiction of human ignorance, delusion, and selfishness disguised as dignity. A key recognition, which may have seemed radical at the time, is that the young wife had not experienced passion with the old baker, so he, unlike everyone else, doesn’t judge her as immoral.

The Baker’s Wife is Pagnol’s best film, and the criticisms that it’s not “cinematic” enough are silly. The picture is so well written and acted that the director’s simple style seems like the only way the movie could have reasonably been made.

And by the way, Orson Welles had good taste.

The architect, László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, is a Hungarian Jew who survives Buchenwald and goes to the United States to find work, anxious for his wife and niece who are still in some danger in Europe. Brody is the movie’s dominating presence, playing a melancholy wreck of a man devoted to his singular artistic vision. It calls for the epic treatment, and the film’s impressive production design and three and a half hour running time seem to give us that, but there’s always a darkly satiric and ironic undertone. Why, for instance, name our main character after a guy who smashed up Michelangelo’s Pietà?

After a lengthy set of circumstances that recreate the density of a novel, László crosses paths with a wealthy patron: Harrison Van Buren, played by Guy Pearce. On the one side, there’s the raw temperamental artist, on the other, the American business tycoon. The contrast is pointedly comic. Everything Van Buren says is pretentious self-important twaddle, and Pearce plays him with such robotic earnestness that you have to laugh, since who could take this seriously? This satirical side of The Brutalist hasn’t gotten the attention it should.

The contrast between Tóth and Van Buren makes the film reverberate beyond our desire for narrative. Corbet and Fastvold are interested in the way a film depicts our experience. László’s own kind of craziness colors most of what we see. The trauma of the war has set his face against these rich WASPs who only tolerate him as a stimulant for their own useless aspirations. In the second part (there’s an intermission) László’s wife, played by Felicity Jones, shows up, and the emotional tone shifts into dream-like psychosexual drama. Crippled by starvation in the camps, she seems to know how to interact with these rich Americans better than László, but behind that she’s angrier. In part two, Van Buren stops seeming so funny. The power that he wields with his money is utterly disproportionate to any quality of his character. He is a far worse person than he could ever admit.

The Brutalist has a score by Daniel Blumberg that is used like one of those all-enveloping scores in the studio era, the rhythms calibrated to the editing. It’s not triumphal music; it’s dark and moody, at times almost sinister. There are also quite a few popular songs from the 1940s and ’50s which are part of the characters’ environment.

Many of the critics, even the ones who like the film, don’t seem to grasp Brady Corbet’s method. The film’s “epic saga” presentation doesn’t have the naive sincerity we expect from the form. In fact, it assumes a critical stance, and that’s one thing we’re not used to seeing in a production of this size. Consider the epilogue, celebrating the opposite of what Tóth was actually about, and ending with a jaunty piece of 1970s disco over the credits.

The Brutalist is an audacious and defiant discrediting of our romantic preconceptions about artists and heroes. It should be seen and believed in.

It’s called a soundtrack because there were Black Americans, jazz artists, that the State Department sponsored as “Jazz Ambassadors” of friendship from the U.S. to emergent African nations, including Congo. The biggest star was Louis Armstrong, but the group also included Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie. We see period footage of those musical tours. Later, the artists complained that they’d been used as a kind of “soft” cover for the actions of the CIA destabilizing the region. Grimonprez uses their music, and that of a host of other figures, many of them part of the “bebop” genre of the late ‘50s: John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and many more, and we also get excerpts from interviews with them about the civil rights and black power movements. For the film, jazz makes a connection between the awareness of Black Americans at that time, and the turmoil in Africa.

The amount of information presented in the picture is prodigious, but the jagged style, bold graphics and amazing period footage make it never less than fascinating. Starting with the period of Nasser and the Suez “crisis,” Grimonprez creates an atmospheric impression of those times in international news. The deliberations of the UN are a central concern. The rise of a “non-aligned” bloc of African and Asian nations caused the Americans and western Europeans to panic. Khrushchev declared support for the decolonization movement and for Lumumba, as did Castro when he came on the scene. The Belgians, who had ruled Congo with bloody ferocity since they stole the land in 1885, were conceding independence, but Lumumba wanted his country to control its own mineral and energy resources. The Belgian corporations didn’t approve of this. They sponsored a puppet government in the south of Congo, and the UN approved its membership. From then on, the inexorable path of subversion led to the end of Congo’s dreams of autonomy.

There are alarming excerpts from interviews with CIA and other intelligence agency officials. They smirk as they describe the clever ways they created division and conflict. The head of the CIA at the time, Allen Dulles, jovially puffs on a pipe and denies everything. UN Secretary General Hammarskjöld is shown trying to make compromises, and becoming hopelessly compromised himself. We hear the American newscasts—the point of view was always that of anti-Communism. That was just the way people in America thought. This film shows that it was determined by secretive and illegal actions designed to perpetuate Western financial interests in the former colonies.

Throughout the film we see Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach perform a piece called “Freedom Day.” In February ’61 the two of them led a group of about sixty activists into the UN Security Council, disrupting the meeting and loudly protesting against the murder of Lumumba in January. We see this in the film, and it is unforgettable.

As we hear near the end of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, “No one will give us our freedom. We have to take it.”

In a big city, our stories can seem to disappear into the enormity of urban life. All We Imagine as Light, the award-winning new film by Payal Kapadia, takes place in Mumbai, the seventh most populous city on earth. In voice-over we hear various migrants, in many different Indian languages, describe their experiences and feelings upon coming to live in Mumbai. The overall sense is of disillusionment. People work and struggle and dream, but they miss their homes and find Mumbai unwelcoming. It’s important that Kapadia starts her film this way. The story turns out to be about three women, but the movie is dedicated to all the people toiling in anonymity in the great city.

Prabha, played by Kani Kusruti, is a nurse at a busy hospital. She is quiet and serious and keeps to herself, not going out to party with her fellow nurses after work. Her roommate Anu, another nurse played by Divya Prabha, is a bit younger and more outgoing. They’re both from the Kerala region and speak Malayalam, but have had to learn Hindi as well, in order to live in Mumbai.

Prabha hears some gossip that Anu has been seen with a young Muslim man. Feeling protective, she confronts her, but then realizes that she has no business being judgmental. Eventually, Prabha confides that she is married, to an Indian man working in Germany, with the plan being that she would be able to join him eventually. The marriage was arranged by her family without her having any choice in the matter. Now the husband hasn’t called her in over a year.

Anu, in turn, confides that she is in fact seeing a young man named Shiaz, who is Muslim. They meet furtively, in places where they don’t think they’ll be seen by anyone who knows them. Anu shares that her family is trying to arrange a marriage for her, but she doesn’t want to go along with this. In the character of Anu, the film speaks for the emotions and sexuality of Indian women who want to be free of the ancient patriarchal strictures that are placed on their lives. Here also is the urgent issue of Hindu-Muslim relations. Anu risks being ostracized by her family and society for loving someone from the wrong religion. But she still chooses love.

The third woman in the story is older, a hospital cook named Parvaty, and played by Chhaya Kadam. A builder is going to tear down the tenement where she lives, and she has no written proof of her tenancy to take to court. Prabha tries to help her, but ultimately Parvaty is planning to quit her job and move back to her home in the country. There she will be poor, but at least have a secure place to live. She is frank and open, kind of a mother figure to the other two women, and the three of them form a strong bond.

With this finely crafted work, Kapadia steps away from the mainstream Bollywood tradition. This picture is deliberately understated in its emotional honesty. We sense the significance of this portrayal of women’s lives in India, without it being made into an explicit message. The warm evocation of the myriad qualities of these women’s lives is conveyed through the director’s poetic visual style and the naturalistic acting. The meaning of the title, All We Imagine as Light, becomes clear to us intuitively, as we are invited to experience the inner life of these women.

Mayhem can be fun. In a movie, I mean, not in real life. There’s a subgenre of crime films in which hapless characters get involved in some kind of crooked business that spins out of control, with multiple unforeseen consequences. These stories can be very funny if done right, and also fascinating, in the sense of “How bad can this get?” the answer of course being very bad. LaRoy, Texas, Shane Atkinson’s first feature as a director, makes something new from the old hired killer premise, not only hilarious and violent, but also touching, which is not easy to pull off.

John Magaro plays Ray, owner of a hardware store in the small west Texas town of LaRoy. His wife, Stacy-Lynn, played by Megan Stevenson, is trying to get a loan in order to open her own beauty shop, but Ray doesn’t have the kind of collateral the bank needs. Stacy-Lynn is nostalgically fixated on her triumph in a county-wide beauty contest years ago, and is clearly unhappy with her marriage to Ray, who is a timid, sad sack kind of guy, depressed about his life without knowing what to do about it.

One day Ray gets a mysterious message to meet someone at a local diner for some “information.” It turns out to be a guy named Skip, who calls himself a private detective. Skip is played by veteran actor Steve Zahn, famous for portraying crazy, foolish, out-in-left-field characters. Skip is wearing a big black cowboy hat, and talks to Ray with the humor and confidence of someone completely sure of himself for no reason at all. From a manila envelope he produces photographs of Stacy Lynn entering and leaving a local motel. Ray did not ask this man to spy on his wife. Skip just hung around the motel trying to get compromising photos of anybody that might lead to getting a client. Ray rebuffs Skip’s attempt to get hired by him, although he does take the photos with him.

Magaro is great at portraying the kind of depression that breaks a man down to almost nothing. Ray still loves his wife, but her contempt for him is hard to ignore. He buys a gun and drives to the motel parking lot. In his car he tries to get up the nerve to shoot himself. A pickup truck suddenly arrives, and a man opens the door to Ray’s care and gets in. He hands Ray a bunch of cash and says that the killing has to happen tomorrow. Totally shocked and confused, Ray won’t agree to anything, but the guy taunting him about not being tough enough makes him decide to go along with it. And thus the mayhem begins.

Clearly this unknown man had made an agreement by phone with a contract killer, and by coincidence has paid the wrong guy. The real killer, played by the reliably creepy Dylan Baker, shows up soon, but too late. That’s as far as I’ll go. The fun is in seeing how the disaster will play out.

Magaro is the movie’s emotional center, but Steve Zahn elevates everything to hilariousness. Skip is a brilliant creation—a complete idiot and loser who makes everything he touches even worse than it was. The film is not cartoonish, though. Atkinson stays just this side of absurdity, so that the comedy seems well earned. And there’s a wounded feeling at the heart of it all—Ray and all the other residents of the town, are just part of a sad, deluded struggle to give some kind of meaning to their vacant lives. LaRoy, Texas is a perfectly dark little gem.

Here, a film by Bas Devos, sort of crept up on me unawares. The title is spelled H-e-r-e, and right away that’s a bit confusing because there’s a different film with the same name this year starring Tom Hanks. Anyway, I don’t think we’re ever explicitly told where “here” is geographically, in this movie that is called Here. Not much of “who” either. The film opens on a construction site in a city, and later some of the men are hanging out after work, and the language is French. The next day, some co-workers are eating lunch on the grass, and we hear some Slavic sounding language mixed in with the French. Later in the movie, people talk in what sounds like German or Dutch. All of this is subtitled in English, but the multilingual and multicultural elements in the picture are a subtle background element, not a central theme.

Looking it all up after watching, I got the details. We’re in Brussels, where French and Flemish are spoken. Romanian immigrants work at the construction site, among whom is Stefan, played by Stefan Gota, who is about to go back home on vacation and spend a month with his aging mother. His car is in the shop, so he has to wait through the weekend until Monday before he leaves. He needs to empty his refrigerator, since he’ll be gone a month, and he makes a bunch of soup out of the vegetables, planning to give it away to various people. When the owner of the garage says the car can’t be ready in time, he gives him some of the soup and the guy relents and says he can do it by Monday after all. At a Chinese restaurant, he meets and talks to a young woman, played by Liyo Gong, who appears to work there. He has an older sister in the city, working as a nurse, and he goes to see her and they talk about family.

The point is that where they are, and the other background information the writer/director doesn’t bother to tell us, isn’t really that important. The casual rhythm of Stefan’s life, and the director’s gently observant style, are what we are actually involved in watching, not a plot or a drama.

Before the restaurant scene, we are introduced to Shuxiu, Liyo Gong’s character, in voice-over. She talks about a time once when she woke up in bed and suddenly didn’t know the names of the things around her in her room. This takes on meaning when we discover that she’s a plant scientist, engaged in naming different species of moss.

This is what’s known as slow cinema, yet it’s only 83 minutes long. Devos goes slowly not to expand our sense of time, but to focus our minds on here and now. Every shot in the picture emphasizes the experience of being present. Stefan realizes he’s not sure about leaving, that he’s a little afraid of going back home, and wishes he could put it off. Then by chance he just happens to see Shuxiu again, as he walks through a dense forest to get to the garage where his car is ready. She’s sitting on the ground near the path, studying some moss. The patient style has already established Stefan’s openness and curiosity about the people and things he encounters. So when he asks Shuxiu about her work, and then decides to follow her around and learn a few things, it seems natural.

There are hidden gifts in our daily lives that often go unnoticed because we’re thinking, planning, remembering, or worrying. The film is designed to make us notice these gifts, and a forest is the best place for it because it’s alive. Here is delicately beautiful, quiet, tender, funny, and generous. It invites us in.

Last Year at Marienbad, the 1961 film by famed French director Alain Resnais, was controversial from the very first moment it was screened. Many intelligent critics either loved it, or hated it. It deliberately defied all the narrative conventions of film that people were used to. And remarkably, this experiment has never been successfully imitated. Fifty years later, the movie remains one of a kind.

Any summary diminishes the startling nature of the film, but I’ll try anyway. The picture opens with the narrator, a young man played by Giorgio Albertazzi, leading us with a strange, repetitive voice-over that fades in and out, as the camera glides through the empty rooms of a huge baroque hotel. When people finally make their appearance, a group of wealthy and impeccably dressed socialites, they move as if in a dream, slowly and quietly, posed like hypnotized mannequins.

Gradually we become aware of the narrator’s obsession with a beautiful woman played by Delphine Seyrig. He believes that they met the previous year, and he describes their meeting to her, in scenes that we see. But she, however, denies that they’ve ever met, and this only causes him to redouble his efforts to make her remember. Meanwhile, a tall rather ominous looking man, played by Sacha Pitoeff, challenges other guests to a game involving matches arranged in odd-numbered rows, a game that he always wins. As it turns out, he may be the woman’s husband. The narrator was prepared to run away with the woman before, but she made him promise to wait a year.

The screenplay was by the avant-garde writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, and part of the film’s compelling texture is due to the sinuous and ornate language of the narrator, whose thought seems to revolve around a single idea or event which he is unwilling to face. The visual style is both beautiful and utterly bizarre—it’s impossible, for instance, to forget the grounds of the hotel, with its abstractly designed garden in which people cast shadows while trees don’t. Resnais translates the narrator’s thoughts into visual terms, so details change and shift along with the sense of time, just like in a dream, and in fact the entire movie can be seen as the narrator’s anxious dream. There’s a kind of secret that comes to light eventually, a key to the man’s mournful obsession, but even that is too obscure to be absolutely sure of.

The haunting, fragile beauty of Delphine Seyrig, in her first role, makes the image of the woman indelible, and indeed it’s impossible to imagine any other actress being able to pull this off. With its funereal organ music and the depersonalized characters, one could even be excused for considering this film as a sort of high concept horror movie. There’s something creepy and cold at times about it, but also there’s something undeniably erotic. It’s definitely one of the weirdest movies ever made. I’ve always been drawn to it, and I notice new things each time I watch it. When you see it, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

German director Fritz Lang was one of the great artists of silent film. Even those who don’t know much about movies before the sound era have probably at least heard about his science fiction epic Metropolis, from 1927. In his time he was more renowned for his innovative crime and espionage films like Dr. Mabuse and Spies. But with the rise of Hitler to power, Lang saw the writing on the wall and left for Paris, where he made one movie and then was discovered and signed by MGM in 1934 to come to Hollywood. At first he had a hard time of it. Metro dropped him after one film, and it took a while to become established. His second film in America, and one of my favorite movies ever, was You Only Live Once, from 1937, produced by an independent, Walter Wanger and distributed by United Artists.

Henry Fonda plays Eddie Taylor, a released convict, in love with his defense lawyer’s secretary Joan, nicknamed Jo, and played by Sylvia Sidney. Eddie tries to go straight, but meets with rejection everywhere, and ends up being framed for murder. Eventually he and Jo go on the run with the law in relentless pursuit.

This movie communicates to me, as much or more than any other, the feeling of living during the Great Depression. The bewilderment and loss of faith in authority, the fatalistic sense that no matter what you do, society will push you down, all reflect the darker side of the popular mood during that era. Although Fonda’s character is well-meaning, he’s no hero by any stretch. His short temper and desperation are all too human, while the world around him is mostly brutal and uncaring.

Henry Fonda hadn’t reached stardom yet—Sylvia Sidney was billed above him in the credits. And, as he confessed later, he hated working for Lang, a perfectionist with a reputation for being overly demanding of his actors. Nevertheless, I think this is one of Fonda’s more remarkable performances, with a hardness to it that is missing from most of his good guy roles. The story was based in part on the criminals Bonnie and Clyde, especially in the sequences where the couple is on the road trying to get to the Canadian border to escape capture—the difference being that these two are essentially innocents who are trapped into their deeds by awful circumstances.

In this film, Fritz Lang once again demonstrates his mastery of the camera as an instrument for the portrayal of extreme feelings. His minimalist aesthetic, and his use of shadow and expressive camera angles, are employed to maximum dramatic effect. There are hokey elements too, typical of 1930s crime drama, such as the kindly Catholic priest who tries to save the Fonda character from himself, or the heroine’s tough, sensible sister cautioning her against her involvement with the ex-con. But the director’s style manages to transcend these limitations of genre. I wish I could say that it boosted Lang’s career, but unfortunately it was a bomb, a total box office failure. Eventually, however, starting in the 1940s, Lang did made his mark on Hollywood.

You Only Live Once, with its doom-laden atmosphere, foreshadowed the post-war American style we have come to know as “film noir,” and is now widely considered a classic. As usual, Fritz Lang was ahead of his time.

With crime dramas, we’ve become used to filmmakers pulling out all the stops to make the stories as exciting and violent as possible. But there’s a movie out now, called The Order, directed by Justin Kurzel, that doesn’t try to do that, doesn’t indulge in any nonsense, because it doesn’t need to: the facts of the story, based on actual events, are suspenseful and thrilling enough on their own.

In 1983, an FBI agent stationed in Idaho investigates a series of spectacular robberies, while at the same time counterfeit money has been turning up. This taciturn and bad tempered agent, Terry Husk, is played by Jude Law, an English actor, and if I hadn’t known he was starring in this film I might not have recognized him. His American accent is perfect, but more than that, he plays a darker character than usual, a man who has experienced a lot of failure and disappointment and is angry about it. Law is amazing in this film, he holds it together, but he shares screen time with a nemesis, played by another English actor portraying an American.

The Order was adapted by Zach Baylin from a 1989 book called “The Silent Brotherhood” by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt. An Aryan Nation splinter group organized the robberies and the printing of counterfeit bills in order to finance a planned revolution against the government. This was a Neo-Nazi organization led by a young man named Bob Mathews, played here by Nicholas Hoult. They operated across the Northwest, in Washington State, Idaho, and Montana, but it was an assassination in Denver, Colorado that brought down the heat from federal law enforcement.

The movie takes us inside this insular community of racist ideologues. I like how the film portrays them as real people, instead of exaggerated villains or monsters. The notion that white people are threatened by Black and Jewish Americans is an assumption built into the lifestyle of these families, with their wives and kids, and friends—and it’s something for the kids to be taught. This is all presented with such matter of fact realism that it’s far more frightening than any more dramatic treatment.

Hoult, an English actor who up until now has been known mostly for young leading man or hero-type roles, is a revelation as the charismatic cult leader, Mathews. The way he talks and behaves with others really makes it understandable that people of like mind would follow him. A pointed contrast is made between the young Mathews and an older man who has led the Aryan Nation for years, a supposed minister waving the Bible while inveighing against threats to white purity, and played by the great character actor Victor Slezak. Mathews rejects him in favor of direct violent action. The Order’s text is a novel, and this is a real thing, called The Turner Diaries, describing the steps a white power group uses in order to start and win a race war that will defeat the American government.

The accurate portrayal of a racist militia movement makes the danger and suspense of this film very intense. There’s some great casting: Jurnee Smollett as Husk’s FBI superior, and Tye Sheridan as a local Idaho cop who first starts piecing the conspiracy together. It works as a tough, efficient crime film, but also as an act of historical memory. The Order is as stark and impressive a warning as you’re ever liable to see.

Years ago, one of my writing teachers taught me the difference between popular fiction and literary fiction. In popular fiction, we know what to expect, and we get exactly that. The main characters face obstacles, conflict, danger—and they overcome all of it in the end, and achieve their goals, more or less. Bad people are defeated, good are rewarded. It’s popular because that’s what we wish life was like, and it’s pleasant to watch it happen. In literary fiction, on the other hand, we don’t know what to expect. The characters are complicated, not good or bad, and things don’t necessarily turn out the way we’d like. It’s more meaningful because it honestly explores the way things are, instead of how we wish they were. But artists sometimes mix these two types together—giving us out of the ordinary outcomes within familiar genres. And this is the case with Viggo Mortensen, who has written, directed and scored a western called The Dead Don’t Hurt. From the beginning of the movie, we’re shifting back and forth between different periods of time. A woman, played by Vicky Krieps, is on her death bed, taking her last breath, as her husband, played by Mortensen, looks on in quiet agony. In the next scene, in a 19th century Southwestern town, loud shots are heard in a saloon, and a well-dressed gunman comes out of the door and shoots some more people in the street, then rides away. Cut to Mortensen’s character, Holger Olsen, burying his wife, his little son watching. A group of men approach, among them the town’s mayor. Turns out that Olsen is the sheriff, the mayor is telling him about the shooting, and they’ve caught the culprit. Immediately we see the trial, but the man being condemned is not the well-dressed gunman we’ve seen committing the crime, but some poor half-wit. Some people in the courthouse protest that the real killer is the son of a wealthy local rancher, but the jury condemns the fool anyway. The sheriff observes all this, and proceeds, without explanation, to turn in his badge to the mayor and leave.

Here we expect the story to be about a quest for justice, or revenge, but instead the film is about Vicky Krieps’ character, a French pioneer woman named Vivienne. It takes some alertness on our part to notice when we’re in a flashback, because the movie doesn’t alert us to these time shifts. We’re just there suddenly, in Vivienne’s childhood in the forests of Canada, with a father who dies fighting the English. Her mother reads to her about Joan of Arc, and in a repeated vision we see the girl encountering a knight in armor in the woods. Later we see her as a young woman in San Francisco, annoyed by an unwanted suitor, then meeting Olsen, a Danish immigrant and carpenter, eventually falling in love with him. We also flash forward, from time to time, to Olsen’s journey on horseback with his little boy, leaving the town behind after burying his wife.

Vivienne is a woman of indomitable will and determination who refuses to conform, and Olsen is her imperfect match. The movie affectingly defies everything we’ve come to expect from the western genre. The gunman, played by Solly McLeod, emerges as a threat to Vivienne, but we don’t get the old revenge plot—instead it’s a film about two people loving each other in the face of great sorrow, and the self-respect that transcends misfortune. Krieps is magnificent in the lead. The Dead Don’t Hurt eventually realizes the deeper truth behind its title. Watch it, and give it time to sink in.

Schepisi adapted a 1972 novel by Thomas Keneally which was based closely on the real story of an outlaw named Jimmy Governor. It took some guts for the filmmaker to tackle this subject, but the success of his previous movie, The Devil’s Playground, opened doors for him to producers and film backers who could help him create something big. At a budget of over a million in 1978, it was, although it’s hard to believe today for such a small sum, the most expensive Australian film up to that point.

Jimmie Blacksmith is played by Tom E. Lewis, an indigenous Australian discovered by Schepisi, who gives a performance of such power that it’s hard to believe he had never acted before. The cast is a mix of professional and non-professional actors, with most of the aboriginal actors new to film. It all flows with a natural intensity that creates a feeling of authentic turn-of-the-20th century behavior in New South Wales.

One of Jimmie’s bosses, for whom he makes fencing on his sheep farm, constantly shortchanges him. When he works for a constable, he is forced to brutalize other natives and conceal the abuse in order to keep his job, while at the same time the boss treats him with utter contempt.

At another farm he is joined by his uncle and his half-brother Mort, and meanwhile he scandalizes the farmer and his family by marrying a young pregnant white woman. The family tries to lure the woman, Gilda, away from her husband because they hate interracial marriage. One provocation leads to another, and the fateful result, initially unintentional, is an outburst of violence.

The Australian public seems to have been unprepared for this level of honesty in a movie. Native Australians had been depicted in films before. Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout from ’71 had raised vital questions about the gulf between aboriginal and white settler culture. Peter Weir had integrated elements of native religious practices in The Last Wave, from ‘77. But no film had dealt so directly as this one with the historical crimes and racist structure of Australian society. In addition, the violence against white people depicted here, although strictly based on the historical record, was shocking to audiences. The picture was also embroiled in the perceived controversy of a white writer and director trying to portray the experiences of indigenous people. In hindsight, it all seems like an overreaction to dealing with a subject long repressed in the mainstream. Schepisi went on to Hollywood for a while, where he had some success.

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, despite its mixed reception at home, was regarded very highly internationally, and it marked the culmination of that emergence of cinematic talent we’ve come to call “The Australian New Wave.”

Benjy is a real pain, which is the casual joke I mentioned from the title. He’s constantly sarcastic and provocative. Every other sentence has the “f” word. He has a kind of renegade charm that dominates and intimidates David, and can also ingratiate him with strangers and casual acquaintances—people tend to like him despite his motor-mouth eccentricity. Culkin’s nervous delivery and offbeat mannerisms reminded me somewhat of his Emmy award-winning character Roman in the HBO series Succession. But his character Benjy in this film is altogether more believable as a lonely, fallible human being. In the midst of the group on the Holocaust tour, he is always taking center stage and steering the conversation his way, the way of trivial personal commentary. At the statue commemorating the Warsaw uprising, which shows a group of heroes engaging in armed resistance to the Nazis, he jumps up on it and starts play acting as one of the figures, eventually getting everyone except David to join him. It’s easy to underrate Eisenberg’s performance as David. His reactions to his cousin’s behavior range from puzzled to angry to embarrassed, but his passive outsider role is funny in its own quiet way.

The humor in this film is based on an unusual dichotomy. There is a contrast between the awe and wonder we may feel while visiting historical monuments and sites on the one hand, and our own private personal problems that we carry around with us wherever we go. This also hints at the difference between our experience as existing individuals, and our awareness of the great abstractions of world history. In this case, however, Eisenberg has added the element of the Holocaust, which is not funny, and thus accentuates the contrast with the everyday foolishness of human beings, typified here by cousin Benjy—thoughtless, selfish, and immature.

Eisenberg doesn’t go overboard with this premise. Rest assured, there’s no laughter when they visit a concentration camp. The humor is just a tool to, in effect, pry open our view of self-centered life—and not just of Benjy, but of people in general. The movie turns wistful eventually, as we contemplate the way people navigate the real pain of history’s victims. Eisenberg makes the smaller details telling, like a brief interaction with a neighbor at the grandmother’s old house that reveals more as we think about it. Culkin is exquisitely annoying and troubled in his role, and we are allowed to finally glimpse the pain under the mask. We are left with the sadness of knowing that there are many people who never grow up. A Real Pain reveals Eisenberg’s unusual insight in basing a comedy drama on this sad knowledge.

Léa Seydoux  plays Sandra, a widowed single mother who works as a translator for events with English or German speakers. She dotes on her young daughter Linn, is coolly proficient in her work, and also happens to be caring for her aging father, a former philosophy professor played by the great Pascal Greggory, who is suffering from a rare form of dementia that causes blindness, among other symptoms.

This man whose career was devoted to the act of thinking, has been robbed of his main source of joy, which was reading books, and now he often isn’t even sure where he is. His family, Sandra and another daughter, and their mother, divorced from him for years but still friendly, has come to an agreement that he can no longer stay unattended for any length of time and should be moved to a nursing home. The film chronicles, from Sandra’s point of view, the painful ordeal of finding an appropriate facility for his care. As always, Hansen-Løve presents people’s lives as a mundane everyday reality rather than as drama, and Sandra’s doubt and grief are all the more vivid for it.

One evening, she runs into a married friend, Clément, played by Melvil Poupaud. He was first a friend of her late husband’s, and then a compassionate confidante for her during her time of grief. It’s been a few years, but they slip right back into the ease and sympathy of their friendship, only to see it soon become more than that. He’s already told her that he’s become distant from his wife—there is less inhibition to battle when they fall, willingly, into being lovers.

When depicting sex, Hansen-Løve is as unpretentious as in all other aspects of her work. She’s unfazed by bodies, or by the occasional awkwardness of erotic life, and the film never gets that “staged for the camera” look that afflicts so many sex scenes in films. Also insightful is how the initial hunger for one another’s bodies is typical of relationships in their earlier stages, but begins to take a back seat to substantial issues involving honesty, commitment, and respect. Clément has a young son, and this prompts him to have second thoughts about divorce. The relationship develops into a familiar dance of “come here, go away,” which becomes stressful for Sandra, to say the least. Her own desire to set a boundary is tempered by her daughter Linn’s adoring feelings towards her mom’s boyfriend, and she can see that the girl is unhappy during the “go away” phases of the relationship.

The story doesn’t need to rely on surprise, and whatever happens are merely circumstances surrounding our main interest, which are the characters, especially Sandra. Léa Seydoux has become a glamorous movie star, and has even played a Bond girl, but here she is, without makeup, embodying this passionate and melancholy character with total conviction. One Fine Morning shows just what it’s like when grief and hardship are happening to us at the same time as romance and renewal.

Here’s the story. Surrounded by the ravages of the plague, a medieval knight (played by Max Von Sydow), who has returned home from the Crusades, is confronted by the personification of Death (played by Bengt Ekerot) whom he challenges to a game of chess. As the knight wanders the country with his squire (Gunnar Björnstrand), who is a bitter atheist, he struggles with doubt about God and life, encounters a wandering circus troupe that includes a gentle fool (Nils Poppe) and his wife (Bibi Andersson), and all the while continues his dialogue, and his chess game, with Death.

The movie presents a kind of medieval world of the mind, boldly translating a grief-haunted theology into stark visual terms. The spooky look of the film (from wonderful black-and-white photography by Gunnar Fischer), the over-powering sense of the Middle Ages as a strange time of cruelty and suffering, the remarkable set pieces such as the procession of the flagellants through the village—are all combined to create an effect that was different than anything audiences had seen since the days of German expressionism. Even the quieter moments of seeming contentment, such as the knight eating strawberries with the young couple from the troupe, have the ominous feel of a pause for rest in the middle of a fight to the death.

The plague, and the atmosphere of fear, turmoil, and madness in the film’s world, is a spur to the knight’s questions, namely: What meaning could there be in all this suffering? and, For what purpose does God allow all this? and of course, Is there even a God at all? The cynical attitude of the squire is the philosophical counterpoint to the knight’s quest (with Björnstrand turning in the film’s standout performance), while the various actions of the other characters represent people trying to survive and get along in one way or another.

Ultimately, Bergman’s philosophical concerns are conveyed more completely by the picture’s visual style and emotional texture than by the dialogue. Of course the images of the caped angel of Death, and his chess game with the knight, are now so familiar (to the point of being repeatedly imitated and even spoofed) that it’s difficult to see them with fresh eyes. But it’s well worth the effort to do so. With a receptive mind one recognizes the picture for the startling, original, and disturbing work of art that it is.

Selecting a new Pope seems a ripe subject for drama because of the air of secrecy surrounding it. It’s not that the mechanics of the procedure are secret, but that the conclave of cardinals that vote on the matter is a sequestered event—no press or public allowed, and for good reason. There’ve been a few films dramatizing this over the years, and now there’s a new one called Conclave. Conclave begins with the death of the old Pope, who is not portrayed as an actual historical Pope, but only within the movie’s fictional world. An English cardinal in the Vatican, Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, was designated by the late pontiff to manage the conclave that will elect a successor. As cardinals all over the world gather in Rome for the conclave, we gradually discern some of the issues and power struggles within the Church. Stanley Tucci plays Cardinal Bellini, who is advocating for a liberalization of church doctrine and claims that he doesn’t want to be pope. He is, however, dead set against the ascension of the reactionary cardinal Tedesco, played by the great Sergio Castellito. Poised in the middle is Cardinal Tremblay, played by John Lithgow, who represents a kind of centrist compromise. But a lot of the non-Italian cardinals are in favor of electing for the first time, an African pope, Nigeria’s Cardinal Adeyemi, played by Lucian Msamati.

Ralph Fiennes’ character, Lawrence, must constantly contend with these factions making backroom deals and claiming that their rivals have committed secret misdeeds in the past. I don’t think you could ask for a better actor to play this part than Fiennes, who displays at all times Lawrence’s quiet struggles and doubts, his commitment to fairness, his idealism, but also a certain naïveté. It’s his performance that completely anchors the film.

The movie was adapted by Peter Straughan from a popular novel by Robert Harris, the kind of page turner you might buy at an airport. It’s not meant as a serious commentary on the Vatican, or as realism, or satire, for that matter. It’s a sophisticated entertainment about power and political intrigue.

From lesser books good films can often be made, and German director Edward Berger, whose version of All Quiet on the Western Front did so well last year, gives the story a propulsive rhythm and manages to make a bunch of priests talking with each other feel suspenseful. There’s nothing flashy or gimmicky here—Berger constructs a solid dramatic framework through which the twists and turns of the story can wind. It sometimes feels like a Hollywood movie from an earlier time, relying on well-drawn character and dialogue to sustain interest.

Catholic faith is treated seriously, not used as a mere pretense for a plot. The production design, the pacing, and the cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine, are first rate. There’s a stellar cast: Isabella Rossellini is also on hand as a stern nun who was a confidante of the old Pope, and she plays a significant role in the story. Finally, the surprise ending is surprising in a clever and delightful way. Conclave shows that there is still a place on our screens for well-made, intelligent drama.

The best documentaries go beyond our desire to be entertained by a subject, like the way something unfamiliar can be made to seem fascinating to a casual observer. A deeper dive brings us into closer contact with ourselves, affecting and often changing our perceptions and feelings about our lives. Our Body, a film by French director Claire Simon, is such a film, a remarkable study of women’s relationship to their own bodies, as seen through the many stories of patients and doctors in the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital.

We witness, without narration, doctors explaining and helping patients in abortion care, fertilization, pregnancy, childbirth, gender reassignment, ovarian and breast cancer, and other aspects of women’s health. We also see treatments, operations, recovery, and women honestly speaking about their histories and challenges.

Perhaps the first thing one would notice about this film is the care, honesty, and attention to detail of the physicians interviewing and advising patients about all the practical aspects of whatever procedure is being planned or discussed. This reflects on the integrity of the particular hospital that agreed to be filmed (Simon, of course, obtained permission from everyone who appears in the movie). It is not, we learn, universally the case in French hospitals. We are seeing a comparatively ideal environment in which the trust between doctors and patients has been earned and maintained. In fact, at one point later in the film, we’re shown a street demonstration against the incidence of sexual abuse of female hospital patients in France, showing us that there are challenges facing the health care system there that are similar to those in other countries, including the U.S.

But the main effect of witnessing the excellent treatment standards in this particular gynecology hospital department, is to reveal, without any sensationalism or special emphasis, basic facts concerning women’s bodies and bodily functions, along with the unvarnished truth about what constitutes proper medical care for women. Our Body is three hours of patient, low-key, observational documentary cinema. In a society where women’s bodies tend to be either glamorized or hidden, this film presents the reality with complete clarity and frankness. There is much to be learned.

Much of the picture was shot during the height of the pandemic, with everyone wearing masks. In the clinical interviews, the doctors ask their patients to remove their masks briefly, along with them, so they can each see to whom they are talking. The doctors are not judgmental. In the case of abortions, the tone is carefully objective, describing the needed preparations and actual processes involved. Several births are shown, from a fairly easy one with an attendant midwife, to a delivery by C-section. Transgender patients are informed about possible issues with their hormone treatments. We are shown the entire IVF process, including the sperm donors, and the harvesting and implanting of eggs. Behind the scenes we see medical testing and research, and the essential work of the nurses.

The camera simply records everything, and hides nothing, but three quarters of the way through we get a bit of a surprise. The director, Claire Simon, becomes one of the players in this true life drama. Our Body is an absolute revelation, an act of freedom from the secrecy and shame that can hamper our health care decisions.

Levan Akin is a Swedish director and screenwriter of Georgian ethnic origin. That is, his parents emigrated to Sweden from the Soviet republic of Georgia in the 1960s, before he was born. After doing some television and film set in Sweden, he started to explore his Georgian heritage, regularly visiting the now independent country. He caused controversy there with a drama about gay men called And Then We Danced, which sparked protests when shown in Georgia, the Orthodox Church condemning it. An out gay man himself, Akin continues to defy conservative Georgian culture in his latest film, about transgender women and those who love them, entitled Crossing.

Crossing begins with characteristic indirection in a town on the Black Sea, where a bad-tempered man with a pregnant wife heaps abuse on a younger man living in his house because he borrowed the car without permission. The young man, we assume, is his son, but it’s a consistent practice of this movie to allow us to make incorrect assumptions. Achi, we eventually discover, is his younger brother, smarting under the overbearing authority of his sibling.

A middle aged woman visits the house—Lia, a former schoolteacher who at one time had the older brother as a student. She’s looking for her niece, Tekla, who’s been missing for over a year since running away from her family home. Do they know anything about her? The couple says no, but then the younger brother speaks up and says she was one of the trans girls who had been living nearby until recently. The brother tells him to shut up. Later, as Lia is walking away on the shoreline, Achi runs after her. He knew Tekla, he says, and she gave him an address in Istanbul to give to anyone who asked about her. After giving Lia the address, he begs her to take him along on her journey. He desperately wants to get away from his situation, and he knows a little Turkish and English, which could help her in her search. Lia, who frowns most of the time and behaves very cautiously, reluctantly agrees. They take a bus to the Turkish border and cross over to Istanbul.

The film is centered around the excellent performance of the actress playing Lia, Mzia Arabuli, a veteran of Georgian film whose face reflects long-suffering patience and stoicism. Ever so gradually, Arabuli allows the secrets of her character’s life to emerge. Her companion Achi, in his twenties but a kid really, a country boy who knows nothing of urban life, is annoyingly impulsive and talks too much, but has a good heart, and finds himself becoming attached to the older woman as a kind of mother figure. Their relationship is difficult, though, Lia having to tell him more than once that she’s not there to take care of him. Then, at one point, on a ferry boat, the camera pulls up a level and we follow a trans woman, an outgoing advocate for the queer community played by Deniz Dumanli. Could this be Lia’s missing niece?

In Istanbul, with little money, Lia and Achi try to navigate a neighborhood mostly populated by sex workers, but their search for Tekla keeps hitting dead ends. Lia is continually challenged by the people she meets in this place. Arabuli is great here. The spiritual journey she portrays is intense. A fine emotional twist about two thirds of the way through is followed by a deeply moving one near the end. Crossing is a beautiful and finely crafted labor of love.

The Hollywood movie spectacle has been focused on fantasy, science fiction, and horror for a while now, with all the excitement and special effects this involves. I confess that I’ve put myself at arm’s length from these genres for the most part. I get tired of all the glitz pretty quickly. Unless it’s that rare film displaying insight into real social and cultural issues: a film like The Substance, the second feature from French writer-director Coralie Fargeat.

The Substance begins with a fitness model and star of morning TV named Elisabeth Sparkle, played by Demi Moore. Elisabeth, like Moore, is somewhere in her late 50s and early 60s, and the boss of the studio wants to get rid of her exercise show and replace her with some younger, more attractive woman, to be discovered. Angry and depressed, she is looking at the end of her celebrity career. Then she discovers a flash drive that someone slipped into her pocket. It promotes a mysterious new product called The Substance that can create from your cells a new, younger hotter version of yourself that you can be on alternate weeks. After throwing this in the trash, another painful day of rejection by her boss makes her change her mind and retrieve the flash drive from the can. She calls the number on it, is told to go to an address, where she finds a kit containing The Substance.

The rules turn out to be complicated. The new you has to repair the old body and feed it a special liquid through a tube to keep it alive, and extract cells from the body and inject them daily to maintain your condition. The new you has to switch back to the old you after exactly seven days, no exceptions. The film details the entire incredible procedure very carefully, and with the use of amazing special effects, the suspension of disbelief is cleverly attained.

The younger version of Elisabeth is played by Margaret Qualley, so beautiful that when she goes to the casting call, they immediately hire her to take over the lead spot on the morning show. She insists that she must have every other week off, they agree to it, and then she becomes a sensation.

You need to know that this movie is a bold example of what they call “body horror,” in which we witness the human body going through bizarre and often disgusting changes. There’s lots of nudity, blood, and gross mutations, and the effects can be both frightening and bizarrely funny. The idea soon becomes evident: The Substance is a satire of the culture’s obsession with women’s appearance, and the exaggerated models of female beauty and sexuality that surround us. The one character that has become two symbolizes the real woman that ages and has feelings, versus the impossible fantasy on the screen.

Fargeat is relentless in her assault on this false female body. This theme is fraught with exploitation, but it’s intensified through the special effects to the point where it’s all so over the top that you laugh in the recognition of the absurdity and degradation of the whole thing. My only problem is with how much the point is hammered home, way more than enough for the audience to get it, I think. Still, Fargeat has taken body horror to a level not seen before. And she follows the logic of her premise to the bitter end. It’s a blistering, powerful piece of feminist cinema.

In 17th century England, a man named Hobson rented out horses to Cambridge students, but to make sure the best horses weren’t overworked, he gave the students a choice: take the horse nearest the stable door, or none at all. Somehow this entered into popular slang so that “Hobson’s choice” meant being given the illusion of a choice when only one thing is actually being offered. In 1915, a playwright, Harold Brighouse, used the expression as the title for a comedy which became a hit in London and New York. There were film versions in 1920 and 1931, and later there was even a musical based on it, but I doubt if Hobson’s Choice would mean anything today if it hadn’t been made into a movie in 1954 by the preeminent British director David Lean, famous for The Bridge on the River Kwai, Laurence of Arabia, and many others. It’s one of the lesser known jewels in the director’s artistic crown.

Charles Laughton plays Henry Hobson, a widower who owns a boot shop near Manchester in Victorian England. He’s a lazy, arrogant old man who tyrannizes over his three adult daughters, who keep the shop going while he spends most of the time at a nearby pub gossiping with his dissolute friends. He fully expects the two younger daughters to get married eventually, although he doesn’t approve of the men currently courting them—but the eldest daughter, Maggie, played by Brenda de Banzie, he has decided must stay single for life and take care of him. She’s thirty years old, and according to him that she’s “on the shelf,” destined to be a spinster. But, she has a different idea.

Maggie is a splendid character, a strong, assertive woman who knows exactly what she wants and how she’s going to get it, not the kind of female figure that moviegoers were used to at the time. She plans to win her struggle with her father, and she has her eye on a shop employee, a timid bootmaker named Willie Mossop, played by John Mills. The quality of Willie’s work is so good that one of Hobson’s best customers, a wealthy old lady, demands that her boots be made by him exclusively.

Maggie tells Willie right out that she wants to marry him, which comes as a great surprise to him. He’s already been pressured into getting engaged to his landlady’s daughter. She promptly marches him over to his lodgings and tells the landlady that the engagement is off. Willie is shocked, but doesn’t protest, which shows that he’s actually quite relieved. The comedy of this whole situation is delicious in an unexpected way. Such a headstrong woman might have usually been portrayed at the time as a nuisance, but her resistance to her father’s cruelty is heroic. When Hobson finds out that Maggie is planning to marry Willie, he insults him and ends up hitting him with his belt. This has the effect of making Willie angry and defiant, and he goes away with Maggie to set up a boot shop of his own. Gradually, Maggie’s love inspires him to grow a spine.

This is the set-up for a marvelous turning of the tables. John Mills is very funny as Willie, but the dominating presence in this film, larger than life, is of course Charles Laughton, with one of his  career best performances as an exasperated curmudgeon, who delights us with his abusive wit even as we cheer his comeuppance. Lean’s direction is smooth and confident. When Hobson’s Choice arrives at the choice promised by its title, the audience has had all the satisfaction it could desire.

Austin, Texas native Richard Linklater has managed to achieve remarkable success as a filmmaker while not compromising his independent views and methods. With a Linklater film you usually get a relaxed comic sensibility combined with intelligent witty dialogue. He doesn’t live near Hollywood, and he has resisted the Hollywood blockbuster mentality, displaying instead a modesty that is satisfied with medium budget films that are well-made, funny and insightful. His latest is called Hit Man, which pokes fun at the absurd “hit man” movie genre. You may recall my review of The Killer last year, a dark satire on a similar theme from David Fincher. Linklater, by contrast, has given us a genial romantic comedy thriller.

Glen Powell plays a philosophy professor in New Orleans named Gary Johnson. He has an air of glib self-assurance that serves him well in a classroom. Gary is an easy-going young fellow, recently divorced, living alone with two cats, and seemingly content. He’s also a tech expert who, for the fun of it, moonlights for the local cops, designing and implementing the surveillance equipment the department uses to catch criminals. One day in the police van when they’re about to do a sting, they find that their undercover guy has been suspended for misconduct. Gary is recruited on the spot to fill in. His job is to go into a restaurant pretending to be a contract killer, and entrap a homicidal idiot into a taped confession. It’s scary, but he agrees to try it. Unexpectedly, the subterfuge stimulates his imagination, and he puts on a very convincing (and funny) imitation of a hit man, which succeeds so well that it leads to a part-time police career for Gary as a fake killer for hire.

The idea for this story was taken from an article in The Texas Monthly about an actual guy who got 70 people busted for conspiracy to commit murder. This basic premise, however, has been whipped up into an outlandish piece of fiction by the co-screenwriters, Linklater and the lead actor, Powell. The scenes where Gary, in various guises and costumes, meets with a series of inept wannabes who try to pay him to kill someone, are hilarious. They all end up in jail. But when he meets one potential client, a beautiful young woman named Madison, played by Adria Arjona, who wants her abusive husband bumped off, he can’t bring himself to entrap her, and instead persuades her not to go through with it, to the chagrin of his handlers.

So overconfident is Gary now, after his success as a cop, that he unwisely pursues a sexual relationship with Madison—not as Gary, but as Ron, his hit man persona, whose aura of danger she finds attractive. Unfortunately, a dirty cop, who used to have Gary’s job, sees them together somewhere and becomes suspicious. Gary now has to maneuver through increasingly insane complications in order not to be exposed.

Meanwhile, his class lectures about the fragility of human identity add counterpoint to his weird evolution as a character. Glen Powell pulls off the difficult feat of making Gary seem both nerdy and bold, and he’s good at riffing on silly action hero conventions. Hit Man is a clever little gizmo of a movie that’s not trying to be deep, just fun.

Fremont, California, is home to more Afghans than any other U.S. city. One of them is Donya, a young woman played by Anaita Wali Zada, living in an apartment there after fleeing her country at war’s end. She commutes daily to nearby San Francisco, where she works in a fortune cookie factory. Donya lives a pretty solitary life, since her family stayed behind in Afghanistan. Her brash co-worker Joanna takes a liking to her, gossiping and talking about her views on life while they work. Donya knows a male Afghan neighbor in her apartment complex that sits outside and smokes a lot, but she’s a bit wary of him. She often eats at a local Middle Eastern restaurant, where the owner, an older man, expresses some disillusionment with life in America.

Persistent insomnia inspires her to get an appointment with a state-funded therapist, played by the amusingly eccentric Greg Turkington. Although all she wants is medication to help her sleep, the therapist insists on completing a certain number of sessions, and he slowly draws her out. In her quiet, hesitating way, she relates the traumatic events she fled from, including dead colleagues and threats against her family because of her work translating for the Army. In one of the many deft touches of the screenplay, by the director and Carolina Cavalli, the therapist becomes more and more emotionally affected by the sessions, while Donya continues to maintain her poise and determination. This is actually a central insight of the film; any expectations we may have that Donya’s encounters with sympathetic Americans will help her through trauma are turned upside down by the realization that her experiences are deeper and more profound, and therefore more helpful to her struggles, than those of the relative privilege she encounters in her new home.

An old lady dies that was writing the fortunes for the cookies, and the company owner, a young and ambitious small-time businessman, asks Donya if she can handle the job. The film’s quirky fortune cookie theme cleverly highlights the mindset of a newcomer to American consumer culture; a combination of life wisdom with a feeling for pure chance. Writing these fortunes, which are vague enough to apply to anyone but specific enough to seem meaningful, stimulates Donya’s imagination and gets her thinking about her life. One day she decides to put a message into one of the cookies, a message seeking a connection of some kind, hoping to get a response. But of course the consequences are messier than she hoped for or expected.

Zada is a first-time actor who herself recently emigrated from Afghanistan, and was discovered by Jalali. She does beautiful work, holding our rapt attention throughout the picture. The black & white photography, the square “Academy” aspect ratio, and the deadpan acting styles remind me a little of the films of Jim Jarmusch. Fremont, though, strikes its own remarkable note. Tenderly it evokes the pensive experience of a wanderer seeking happiness in a world not her own.

I’ve long been interested in Russian film, including films from the Soviet era. But I’ve only recently begun to explore the work of one of the giants of Russian cinema, who is still with us at the age of 87—Andrey Konchalovsky. He started as a screenwriter in the ‘60s, then moved to directing. And he reached the peak of this phase of his career in 1979, with Siberiade, an epic 4-hour achievement released in two parts, originally for Soviet television.

Siberiade tells the story of two families, through three generations, in a Siberian village, from the turn of the 20th century to the 1960s. The title evokes Homer, and of course we also think of Tolstoy. But they wrote about princes—Siberiade is an epic of the common people: rough and ungainly, romantic and sentimental, yet refusing to celebrate history, grieving instead.

One of the families in the story is well off, in a small town way, and the other family works for them. The patriarch of the poor family becomes obsessed with chopping through the thick forest to make a path to a legendary swamp nicknamed “The Devil’s Mane,” dreaded by the superstitious villagers.

This man’s young son Nikolai encounters by chance an escaped revolutionary, who is soon recaptured, but not before influencing the attitude and thinking of this boy forever. When he grows older, he falls for a beautiful member of the prosperous other family, stealing her away and causing permanent hostility between him and that clan. Then the revolution arrives, and the power balance changes.

The story coalesces in Part 2, when Nikolai’s son Alexei (played by Konchalovksy’s older brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, a director in his own right) returns to the village in the 1960s, having survived the horrors of World War II and its aftermath, to drill for oil and thus obliterate his home in the name of progress. It is here that the cumulative emotional effect of the multigenerational saga meets bitter historical irony. The socialism of the Soviet Union is not portrayed here as a great blessing, but as a destructive impersonal force that threatens connection to the past. The censors eventually had trouble with this when the film was set to be released in theaters.

The point of view in this later part of the film is shared by the man who was the rival lover with Alexei’s father for the hand of the young beauty back in the beginning of the film. Filipp, played by Igor Okhlupin, has become an important Party official in Moscow. He is sent to his Siberian homeland to find out how the search for oil is going, and if it doesn’t look promising, to direct the entire area, including the village, to be flooded as part of a plan for a massive hydroelectric power station. Like Alexei, he has mixed feelings about all this.

The women in the story are its heart, and they suffer the most. The men are violent and contentious, and they frequently misbehave. Historically, the film presents a pessimistic critique of the Soviet experiment, right in full view, but too subtle for the censors to understand. Yet the substance of this film is the texture of people’s lives, mysterious and ungovernable, always greater than the theories meant to confine them. Siberiade is clamorous and messy. It’s also a real epic.

When considering the progress of gay rights, it’s important to remember how long LGBT people have had to hide their sexual identities from family, employers, and government in order to avoid discrimination and persecution. The taboos have a persistent and damaging effect on people’s minds, and it would be a mistake to think this is all in the past now, despite the obvious gains that have been made. British writer-director Georgia Oakley doesn’t see pride as a way to avoid dealing with queer shame and conflict, nor a way to pretend that gay people are no longer under threat from social forces that promote hate against them. Her debut film, Blue Jean, tells a story from a time, the 1980s, when the perils of coming out were especially acute.

Rosy McEwan plays Jean, a PE teacher in a secondary school in the Newcastle area of northeastern England. She also happens to be a lesbian, with a social life outside of work that includes a lover named Viv, played by Kerrie Hayes. We observe Jean as part of a close-knit group of women who are part of the local gay bar scene, and we see her relationship with Viv as fun, playful, and loving. But she’s closeted at work, which in 1988 was just how it was for LGBT people in public facing jobs such as teaching.

In Jean’s class, a new student named Lois, played by Lucy Halliday, appears to have some behavioral problems, but Jean chooses to be patient and understanding with her. She’s a talented basketball player, and Jean encourages her in that. Lucy also becomes the target of some bullying by other girls, ostensibly because she acts differently than they do, and jealousy is maybe part of this too. But Jean isn’t really showing favoritism—she is determined to be fair, whereas these high school girls are often very unfair. One night, Jean sees Lois at the gay bar she frequents, and Lois sees her. That one of her students knows her secret now stirs up a lot of anxiety for her. Further events, and Jean’s response to them, only make her more vulnerable.

McEwan’s lead performance beautifully conveys her character’s confusion, self doubt, and tense hyper-vigilance in the midst of a culture where it’s not OK to be herself. For instance, Jean’s sister asks her to babysit her son, which she loves to do, but when he tells Mom later that Viv was there, the sister (who knows that Jean is lesbian) gets uptight about it, as if exposing her son to Jean’s queer life poses a danger to him. At work, she silently endures homophobic statements made casually by colleagues that don’t know she’s gay.

The brilliance of Oakley’s story lies especially also in how Jean and Viv and all the characters have internalized the conflict presented by the system, trying to navigate impossible contradictions while being unforgiving to one another or themselves. The color blue is a recurring element, which I took to represent the happiness and self-acceptance possible for lesbians living freely. Blue Jean is a vision of how it was in one of the darker moments of struggle, but it rings true for our present uncertain time as well.

With each new film, Christian Petzold increases his stature as the foremost 21st century German director. His latest is called Afire. It’s a different kind of work for him, in that here Petzold turns a critical eye on the figure of the lonely artist, the kind of person employing the symbolism and emotional dramaturgy that Petzold himself has displayed in some of his previous films.

Two young men: Felix, a photographer, played by Langston Uibel and Leon, a writer (Thomas Schubert), go to stay at a house near the shore of the Baltic Sea, owned by Felix’s mother. The car breaks down on the way, which gets everything off to a bad start. When they arrive, they’re surprised to find Nadja, a young woman played by Paula Beer, renting a room there. Leon has trouble sleeping because he can hear Nadja in the next room apparently having sex. Going outside to sleep, he sees a man leaving the house in the morning. It’s a fourth character, Devid, who works as a lifeguard at the beach nearby. When Felix and Leon meet Nadja that day, she turns out to be very confident and friendly, full of humor and good spirits, and beautiful as well. Leon seems both attracted to and repelled by her.

It took a little while for me to realize that the film has a main character, the “point of view” character as they say, and it’s the person that in most stories like this would be a supporting role—it’s Leon, the depressed writer. Leon wants to finish his second novel on this trip, but everything that has happened so far annoys or upsets him. He’s a lumpish disagreeable kind of guy, who seems challenged or nonplussed by the behavior of Nadja, Felix, and Devid. Petzold pulls off an interesting narrative trick here. All the intrigue one might expect from the set up, three men and a woman in a summer cottage, is completely muted, in effect only existing in the mind of the self-involved, suspicious Leon.

This “point of view” colors and distorts everything the audience sees—it is Leon who rejects everything offered, and all we can really see are his weird introverted reactions. When they go swimming, for example, he says he can’t go with them because he needs to work. But left alone at his typewriter, he mostly just fusses, paces around, and stares into space. Nadja seems to have his number. She can sometimes be brutally honest, but in truth she’s open to being friends. For him, though, everything is taken personally. The arrival of a fifth character, Leon’s editor Helmut, to go over the manuscript with him, adds another element of tension. When he senses that Helmut doesn’t like the writing, Leon goes into full defensive mode. It is a superb performance by Schubert as Leon, accessing a place of deep emotional insecurity.

Afire is a good poetic choice for a title. The German title literally translates as “Red Sky.” In the evenings, the characters observe a wildfire in a nearby forest that turns the sky red. The summer wildfires have become frequent in Europe as they have around the world. The  real question in this film is how the artist should respond. Leon is too busy being the center of the world to recognize and truly appreciate the human beings sharing the space with him. Afire is about personal barriers coming down in spite of all denial, when we’re forced in the end to see past ourselves.

On a firelit night in an unnamed town, we see people taking oil from a tapped pipeline and pouring the stolen oil into containers. A gang of outlaws, primarily women, operate an illegal oil refinery in Brazil, in a favela, a slum near the city of Brasilia. Above the building is a flag that says, “The Oil is Ours.” The film is called Dry Ground Burning, written and directed by Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta, and it takes place during the recently ended reign of right wing nationalist president Jair Bolsonaro.

We first see Léa, a tough former drug dealer, when she returns home after serving a long prison sentence. Everything has gotten worse. The favela is now constantly patrolled by police helicopters. A huge new prison complex is being constructed there by incarcerated labor. Léa goes to work with her half sister Chitara, who is more low key, but is in fact the person who first thought of siphoning oil from pipelines and refining it into gasoline to be sold on the black market, with the local biker gang her primary customers. With the success of her pirate operation, Chitara has become legendary, with poor people in the slums actually singing songs about her. Chitara and Léa are daughters of a wily and brutal local gangster, now deceased, whom they reminisce about with a mixture of contempt and admiration.

Some of the women also work regular jobs, in a factory turning the wood being cut every day from the Amazon rain forest into building materials. The film intently and patiently depicts the experience of physical labor. The life of poverty we witness is one where there is little freedom to consider higher goals than survival. One of the women, Andreia, belongs, along with other characters, to a small Pentecostal church where the affirmation of Jesus’ power provides a sense of purpose otherwise lacking. But this turns out to be a glimpse from Andreia’s past. In the present she’s an activist for a group called PPP: the Prison People’s Party, which opposes the theft of national resources and destruction of the environment by the owning class.

Queirós and Pimenta defy the usual narrative techniques. They use a steady focused approach showing the entire environment of a scene at length rather than chopping it up. The film is constructed with a kind of intentional disorder, a documentary type realism combined with improvisation by non-professional actors, with the main ones actually playing versions of themselves, even stepping out of character at times to talk about their real lives outside the film. Everyone chain smokes. The night scenes are an incredibly vivid display of black and gold.

We also follow a miserable group of policemen in an armored vehicle patrolling the favela at night with guns drawn and a little drone leading the way. One extended sequence takes place at a real life Bolsonaro rally where we witness the mindless slogans and rituals of this neo-fascist mass movement. The gas hustlers are a counter to all this, as is the film itself. And as dangerous and dirty as their lives are, they represent the power of indigenous people, the poor, and the people of color. Dry Ground Burning is a bold film about a world on fire.

Mama Efe’s daughter Zinwe, who is destined to inherit the role of intermediary, becomes angry when her mother says she cannot help a woman find her missing daughter. Zinwe has struggled to believe in Mami Wata, and now her doubt drives her into exile. We see her standing on the seashore, trying to make contact with the goddess, and giving up in despair. Meanwhile, things come to a head when Mama Efe’s efforts to cure a sick village boy fail and the boy dies. There’s a group of men who want the village to enter the modern age and get roads, schools, and hospitals. They accuse Mama Efe of cheating everyone by promoting baseless superstition.

All this seems very plausible, and Efe’s other daughter Pesca, who is adopted, wavers in her belief as well. But she had fled from violence as a child, and Efe had taken her in, nurtured her, so out of a sense of love and duty she remains loyal. With so much of the drama about Mama Efe and Zinwe in the early going, it’s a surprise when we notice the second daughter Pesca, played by Evelyne Ily, taking center stage in the story. It is she who rescues a stranger from drowning, a man named Jasper, that she thinks might be an answer to her dilemma from Mami Wata. Jasper acts grateful and respectful to her and her mother, but he also agrees that the region needs schools and hospitals. An attraction develops between Pesca and Jasper, but the story never goes the way we might expect it to.

And that’s one of the strengths of Obasi’s filmmaking—we’re always being thrown back on her heels, never really sure of the truth, living in a kind of  suspended mystery state, until our eyes are opened to new insights at the end.

To reveal any more would be to spoil things. Suffice it to say that the stakes are higher than a simple conflict between religion and science. Without special pleading or romanticism, Obasi explores a matriarchal way of feeling and seeing, and its conflict with male power reveals a social reality that is deeper even than the injuries from the colonial past. The characters speak a mix of Fon, a major West African language, and a pidgin English clearly inherited from their former British colonizers. The story, suffused with a mystical sense of connection to the sea, escalates from one unexpected emergency to the next, ultimately reaching an epic scale. Although not everything Obasi tries to do works, the act of trying shows courage. Mami Wata is an impressive stylistic feat, resonant with meaning.

I’ve seen plenty of documentaries about musicians, some very good—usually you get a biography of the subject; interviews with friends, colleagues, and others; and of course performances. But there’s a movie I watched recently called Rewind & Play, featuring the great jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, and it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Monk was a brilliantly innovative composer and performer from the 1930s on, highly regarded by fellow musicians but not one of the big names in jazz, until his albums finally started selling in the ‘60s. In 1969, after a European tour, he was interviewed in Paris for a TV show.

Now, all these years later, and with Monk having died in 1982, the Senegalese-French director Alain Gomis dug into the archives of this French TV series called “Jazz Portrait,” and found all the rushes and unseen outtakes from the interview with Monk. It is his edit of this footage that constitutes the film Rewind & Play. None of this background information is fully explained in the movie—only gradually can we understand the nature of what we’re watching.

We see Monk arriving by plane in the city with his wife Nelly and an entourage. We watch them talking in the back of the car that’s taking them to the studio. They stop at what appears to be a Paris bar, and everybody continues to talk while Monk looks thoughtful, smoking cigarettes and having a drink. With his beret and goatee-style beard, he is unmistakable, but he hardly does any talking. Your usual film might’ve cut all this, but Gomis keeps all the footage in, and the effect is kind of strange. Monk is like an island of quiet stillness in the midst of noise. He smiles while staring dreamily into space. We wonder why he seems so distant, as if he’s in some other reality, not paying much attention to this one.

This puzzling effect continues when they arrive at the studio. There’s a piano, and people setting up all the lighting for the interview, but Monk isn’t yet being told what’s going on or what to do. Eventually he just sits down and starts playing. And as he plays in his distinctive improvisatory style, with this amazing sound flowing out from his fingers on the keyboard, we realize that *this* is his reality, his beautiful world—the music is where his mind and spirit have been living inside of him, and only now do we know who he is.

Then the interview begins. The host, Henri Renaud, asks questions that try to simplify Monk for a mainstream French audience. But Monk is unable to play along. He smiles in apparent disbelief as Renaud tries to get him to describe his marriage, why he put a piano in his kitchen, and why people didn’t seem to understand his music on the first tour in Paris in 1954. The answers he manages to give are not considered interesting enough, and so they keep reshooting the questions while Monk gets more and more restless. In hindsight it’s funny, because obviously Renaud, who claims to be a friend of Monk, doesn’t really get him at all. But at the time it was clearly uncomfortable, as the artist’s intense involvement in his music prevented him from engaging with such a superficial approach.

We feel relieved when Monk finally plays again, and we are transported once more into his amazing inner realm. Rewind & Play lets us experience the vast gulf between our normal critical mind and the unexplainable truth of creation.

British film comedy came into its own in the years following the Second World War. Maybe the extremity of that experience caused something to shift. In any case, there was a new spirit of satire in movies, a flippant disregard for the old values of class snobbery and the stiff upper lip. In the late 1940s and continuing into the ‘50s, the Ealing Studios in west London produced a series of comedy films that are still admired today, many of them featuring an up-and-coming new talent. Alec Guinness.

A good example is a film from 1949, directed by Robert Hamer, called Kind Hearts and Coronets. A summary will give you an idea of how outrageous this film was for its time. A young man, a minor figure in an aristocratic family, wants to become a duke. But there are eight family members ahead of him in the line of succession, so he decides to kill them one by one in order to inherit the title. And here’s the kicker: all eight of them are played by Alec Guinness.

Dennis Price stars as our murderer, Louis Mazzini, a man of refined culture, suave and sophisticated, trapped against his will in the English middle class. His mother was a D’Ascoyne, a family whose eldest member is a lord, the Duke of Chalfont. Mama was disowned by her family after she eloped with an Italian named Mazzini, who died shortly after the birth of their son. She brought Louis up with a consciousness of his noble heritage, cruelly robbed from him, and tells him that her final wish is to be buried in the D’Ascoyne family vault. But the Duke rejects this request with contempt. After the burial of his mother in an ordinary graveyard, Louis’ mind is bent on revenge. His plan to eliminate all the D’Ascoynes ahead of him in line begins at that moment.

In a subplot which becomes important, Louis is staying at the house of a local acquaintance, a doctor, and his daughter Sibella, played by Joan Greenwood, she of the marvelous husky voice that sounds a little like a cat’s purr, or as I read somewhere, like someone gargling champagne. Louis wants her, she loves him, but she decides to get married to a boring but very wealthy rival. So in this way as well, class—which more often than not, also means money—prevents Louis from attaining what he’s sure he deserves.

Dennis Price’s performance as Louis is great. We first see him in prison, awaiting execution for murder, while writing the memoir that explains everything he did, and his narration of this memoir becomes the narrating voice of the film. Louis is witty, yet impeccably polite. Because of his manner of behaving, scenes that might be horrifying in a serious drama are hilarious here. The calmness and aplomb with which he disposes of his rivals is strangely funny in itself, and then much more so because of Alex Guinness’s portrayal of each victim. Guinness has a distinct voice and appearance for each character, one of whom is a woman, and all of which satirize the silliness of the upper classes, the idiocy concealed behind the pretentious veil of dignity. Secretly we enjoy seeing them getting bumped off.

The movie’s title, Kind Hearts and Coronets, is a quote from Lord Tennyson, England’s most respectable poet. The film actually respects no one, except the audience. It is a classic.

A woman is released from Rikers Island prison in New York in 1994 after doing time for a theft charge. Inez, played by Teyana Taylor, is a hair stylist trying to scrape by in Brooklyn. One day she sees a 6-year-old boy and approaches him. He is silent and reserved. It’s her son Terry, who entered a foster home when she went to jail. Inez discovers that he is unhappy in the foster family, and decides to somehow get him out and have him live with her.

The movie is A Thousand and One, the remarkable debut feature by A.V. Rockwell that won the grand prize at Sundance last year. Let me preface what I’m going to say by noting that whoever put together the preview for this film stuck all the high note drama together in the trailer, which made it look like a big loud melodrama about the triumph of the human spirit. I guess that sells tickets—I’m not sure. But A Thousand and One is in fact a carefully measured, well-written, and beautifully paced drama about people that seem as real as life.

Inez does eventually spirit her young son Terry out of the foster home where he’s being neglected. She concocts a new name and history for him so that Child Protective Services won’t discover what happened. And then the movie covers the next twelve years of their life together, years of struggle and endurance.

Terry, who is played by three different young actors at ages 6, 13, and 17, remains quiet and insecure, while his mother seems like a whirlwind, a force of nature, pushing him to get his education and become somebody. Mother and son are not at all idealized. Inez is moody, erratic, and controlling. She cuts corners. Terry never acts like the sweet optimistic kid that we usually get in movies. He’s troubled, and never seems less than authentic. An ex-boyfriend nicknamed Lucky, played by Will Catlett, moves in. He is not idealized either. He’s neither an abusive stepfather, nor a sensitive caregiver, but a complicated person with a history. That’s one reason this film is so good. Rockwell writes nuanced characters instead of types. The context is straightforward—the environment of black people and their communities in New York, which includes an ever-present awareness of oppression, as well as pride and steady resolution.

This is a powerful performance by Teyana Taylor as Inez. I had not been previously aware of her. She’s also a singer-songwriter, and apparently a fashion icon. Judging by this film, she’s also an excellent actor. She shows us subtle changes in her character developing through the years. The youthful recklessness becomes tempered, motherhood makes her toughness more authentic, yet she’s essentially the same woman. It turns out that she has some secrets that lend her character an almost tragic dignity.

While the charcters’ life stories go on, Rockwell—a New York City native—also provides an oblique history documenting the deteriorating state of New York City, and Harlem in particular, up to 2005. Inez’s landlord, instead of repairing her apartment, tries to push her out so he can “gentrify” his building.

A Thousand and One is Inez’s apartment number—actually 10-01, but the dash, for some reason, has been stolen. Maybe it hints at the number of challenges she and her son must face to survive—or the stories that she, like Scheherazade, must tell. The movie invites us to witness the difficult truth.

As the film Perfect Days begins, the morning light awakens a man named Hirayama, who sits quietly on his sleeping mat for a while before rolling it up, then brushes his teeth and shaves in his tiny bathroom, finally emerging from his home, smiling as he looks up at the sky. After getting a coffee from a vending machine in the courtyard, he gets into his van, chooses the cassette tapes he will listen to that day, and goes to work, cleaning a series of public toilets in Tokyo. As the film proceeds, we watch him go through this very same routine, day after day.

Here’s an idea that you’d think would never work: a drama about the daily life of a man who cleans toilets. But German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who directed and co-wrote the picture with producer Takuma Takasaki, pulls off a little miracle in Perfect Days. The gentle repetition of Hirayama’s routine (and of course not every day is exactly the same) manifests his humility and attention to each moment. The carefully paced editing keeps us gently in the present. Yet some things do happen. A young eccentric co-worker doesn’t share Hirayama’s work ethic—he’s more interested in social media and hitting on a young woman working at a bar. One day, he persuades Hirayama to let him use the van to pick up the woman. Nothing terrible happens. It’s not that kind of movie.

Later, Hirayama’s teenage niece shows up unexpectedly, having run away from her controlling mother. They share some nice moments together, until the mother, his adult sister, arrives in a limousine to retrieve her daughter, and in the process we learn a little more about the past of our main character.

The main reason all this works is that Hirayama is played by the great actor Kōji Yakusho. Americans might remember him from Tampopo, Shall We Dance, or Babel, all films over a decade old.  He’s 68 now, but still an incredibly vibrant actor and handsome man.  For most of the movie, he doesn’t even talk. His body language and facial expressions are enough. When he finally does say things, thoughtfulness and sensitivity are evident, but also pain and sorrow.

The toilets Hirayama cleans have some trash and dirt in them, but audiences will immediately note that you don’t see the kinds of disasters common in public restrooms in the States. I don’t know if this is meant to be culturally accurate or significant. I do know that Wenders was inspired by the Tokyo Toilet Project, a redesign of 17 facilities in the upscale Shibuya neighborhood. Authorities asked him if he would be willing to do a series of short documentaries about the project. He declined, instead deciding to do this fictional treatment.

Sometimes Wenders swerves close to whimsy, but always pulls back in time through the repeated motifs and the feelings evoked from the gentle rhythms of attention. Hirayama’s choice of songs is for the most part all too familiar—but nothing can spoil the film’s overall effect of profound simplicity and beauty.

Perfect Days takes the radical position that a simple working life can be a blissful one, while at the same time touching our hearts with loneliness. A perfect day is any day you feel free.

Jeff Nichols’ films are known for their gritty working class flavor. His latest one, The Bikeriders, is based on a book of the same title by photographer Danny Lyon, about an actual motorcycle club in the Midwest during the 1960s that eventually turned into a gang. Nichols wrote the screenplay, which captures the inchoate speech patterns of these working class tough guys, and the picture has the loose style of ’70s American cinema. For those accustomed to the slick, overpowering modern Hollywood action aesthetic, this movie might seem like a throwback. In a good way, I think. The biker film genre has of course been associated with low budget exploitation, but here there’s less grandiosity and more honesty. Nichols made an excellent artistic choice; the film’s point-of-view character is a woman.

Jodie Comer plays Kathy, a strong-willed, fairly conventional seeming young woman from Chicago. In a bar to meet a friend, she encounters members of the Vandals Motorcycle Club. Many are drunkenly rude, which turns her off. But as she’s leaving she sees a very handsome biker named Benny, played by Austin Butler, and it’s love at first sight, which was still something people believed in, in 1965.

Comer is from Liverpool, England, but you’d never be able to tell that from this performance, where her Chicago accent and streetwise mannerisms seem genuine. She narrates a lot of the film, as we see her character being interviewed by the photographer, Danny Lyon. Kathy’s outside and inside perspective—in a way she’s not from the same world as these guys, yet becomes one of them—is a crucial ingredient that makes the film effective. She enjoys and reflects the romantic self-glorification of the bikers, but at the same time she can see all the stupidity, waste, and absurdity too.

Austin Butler, who gained some fame playing Elvis Presley a couple years ago, plays Kathy’s partner Benny, whose hatred of authority manifests in crazy violent ways. He is fearless, which makes him a dangerous man, and lends him a lot of prestige within the club. But his love for Kathy hints there’s more to him.

The Bikeriders’ other main ingredient, holding the narrative together, is another English actor, Tom Hardy, as the leader of the club, Johnny. He is an inarticulate married guy with a job, but also a wild streak. Hardy is a master at depicting exploding rage, which Johnny usually does when he’s drunk. But he plays the role otherwise as tense and strongly contained. His sometimes high-pitched mumbling delivery reminded me of Brando. Sure enough, we find that Johnny was inspired to start the club after seeing Brando in his one biker film, The Wild One. Hardy’s performance elevates the film to a more deeply felt level.

Jeff Nichols’ favorite actor, Michael Shannon, is on hand as one of the more unruly gang members. A lot of other male character actors do some fine work. These young men being portrayed are full of energy, high spirits, and fierce loyalty. They also resent what you might call straight society, and people who have managed to get more educated, and the cops, and eventually other gangs. The dramatic arc leads to more violence. Kathy recognizes the insanity, and thus we, the audience, can also see through the toxic myths that the characters weave around themselves. The Bikeriders takes us on quite a journey.

His latest film is called Kinds of Kindness. Teaming up with his former co-screenwriter Efthimos Philippou, Lanthimos returns in this film to the difficult aesthetic of his earlier stuff. The film consists of three separate stories, with a group of the same actors playing most of the characters in each story. Foremost among them are Emma Stone, Jesse Plemmons, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley.

In the first story, Plemmons plays an enigmatic fellow who deliberately rams his car into that of an older man with the initials RMF, whom we have already seen being given a package by Qualley’s character in an earlier scene. Her husband is a sinister corporate executive played by Dafoe. Plemmons’ character, we then learn, is under the complete control of this CEO, who tells him what to do in every aspect of his life, even deciding whom he should marry. In fact, he controls him sexually as well. But this timid follower played by Plemmons is unwilling to kill RMF by smashing into his car more forcefully, and because of this, his controller loses confidence in him.

In the second story, Plemmons plays a cop whose wife, played by Stone, has been in a helicopter crash. The pilot, RMF, has died, but she survives and returns home, only to have her husband develop the paranoid belief that she’s not really his wife, but some kind of replacement. It is this husband that is trying to control everything in this tale, and his wife’s desperate determination to obey everything he says in order to prove her love, results in extreme horror and disgust.

Finally, in story number three, Stone and Plemmons play members of a cult that have been asked to find a woman foretold to possess the power to revive the dead. This creepy cult, with Dafoe as the leader, insists on its followers being pure, “uncontaminated” by outside elements. Once again, people are being dominated by an authority, in this case the cult. And the person they want to resurrect from the dead? You guessed it: RMF.

The film is maniacally focused on this issue of authority, and the distortions that people go through in relationship to it. There are many disturbing things symbolized, but of course rather than explaining anything, Lanthimos leaves it all out for us to untangle. Who is RMF? Why is everyone afraid of freedom? Even though there is an occasional strained sense of humor, Kinds of Kindness is more than anything else, terrifying. The world Lanthimos presents is not at all one of kindness, but of violence. It’s a dark vision for our times—not for the faint hearted.

Gladstone plays Jax, a tough character living on the edge in Oklahoma’s Seneca-Cayuga Reservation. Her older sister has disappeared; there’s been no word from her for weeks, yet law enforcement doesn’t care enough to put any effort into finding her, since she’s run off suddenly before. The film’s excellent depiction of gritty life on the “rez” makes it clear that the disappearance of native women is sadly not unusual, but another symptom of neglect, mistreatment, and poverty.

In the meantime, Jax is taking care of her sister’s 13-year-old daughter Roki, played by Isabel Deroy-Olsen, a bright new talent who holds her own with Gladstone. An interesting aspect of the story, that Gladstone makes wholly believable, is that Jax is involved in some shady stuff, and is not at all what you would call a completely healthy influence on her niece. Together they make money through hustling and stealing—at one point they steal a white man’s truck and sell it to a guy Jax knows, and it turns out she has sometimes sold drugs for him. There’s a self-destructive streak in Jax’s nature, but we also understand that there aren’t a lot of respectable ways to thrive in her world. Roki has adopted her aunt’s attitude and has developed talents of her own, getting into the habit of shoplifting even when she doesn’t really need to, something that worries Jax.

The title of the movie, Fancy Dance, comes from a form of dance that has become common in gatherings known as “powwows.” Roki danced with her mother at powwows, and she desperately wants to get to this year’s annual event in Oklahoma City, convinced that her mother will show up there. Jax has her doubts, but doesn’t share them with her niece, promising to take her there. But then Child Protective Services discoves Jax’s arrest record, and decides to give custody of Roki to her white grandfather, played by the reliable Shea Wigham. He wants to be helpful, but Jax has never forgiven him for abandoning them when their mother died. The threat of losing Roki becomes the crisis fueling the plot, and eventually we end up in thriller territory.

Gladstone is nothing less than compelling throughout the film. I was amazed to discover that she did this performance during breaks in the making of Scorsese’s film, which was also shot in Oklahoma. Tremblay makes the stakes high—things could go terribly wrong in this story. The thriller aspect really got my heart racing. But above all this, Fancy Dance presents a steady, vivid awareness of the many details, large and small, that make up contemporary native life, and of the strength and love that must hold it all together.

The plot begins with Thelma getting robbed in a phone scam. This is not intended to be particularly funny. Unscrupulous characters cheating vulnerable older citizens through phone, texts, or emails—this is an unfortunate reality that has become more and more frequent in recent years. We can only groan in sympathy as we see Thelma taken in, and sending ten thousand dollars in the mail to supposedly post bail for her grandson. Of course she feels like an idiot when her family figures out that she’s fallen victim to scammers. They all say there’s nothing she can do about it, so just let go and stop worrying. But Thelma won’t let go. A strong-willed woman given to obsessions, she’s determined to somehow get her money back.

The actors playing Thelma’s family, in addition to Hechinger, are good. Her daughter, Daniel’s mom, is played by one of my favorite performers, Parker Posey, and Clark Gregg is amusingly low-key as the dad. The plot is of course, quite implausible if you step back and think about it, which you don’t because it’s an enjoyable easy-going comedy, and a fine excuse for showcasing June Squibb’s considerable comic talents. A lot of the humor lies in the contrast between the family’s view of Thelma as a simple lovable lady who can’t take care of herself, and the outrageous action that she chooses to embark upon. They underestimate her at every turn, and truth to tell, she sometimes acts more than a little crazy.

Thelma enlists a friend at an assisted living facility, played by the veteran actor Richard Roundtree, to help pull off her scheme. Roundtree, in his final film appearance (sadly, he passed away last year), adds a lot of depth to the picture. He’s as natural and relaxed a performer you could ever want, with sharp comic timing, and a good match for Squibb.

Margolin’s ability to make us believe and sympathize with all his characters is a rare strength. And far too often in comedies the elderly are depicted as cute & lovable, unbelievably witty and outrageous, or some other exaggeration. Margolin opts for a measured approach in both character and situation, which makes the laughs in this movie feel earned. The screenplay is funny without having to try too hard, and the  film has a feeling of real affection. Thelma is a surprising little treat.

In Greek mythology, a chimera was an imaginary monster combining the features of a lion, a goat, and a snake. But later, for some reason, it became a metaphor for foolish or delusional ideas and objectives. La Chimera, the new film by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, tells of a young man who compulsively pursues the risky and impractical goal of quickly becoming rich through the theft of antiquities, a chimera that keeps slipping through his fingers.

The film takes its time letting us figure out its background story. We first see Arthur, played by the excellent Josh O’Connor, in a memory, or maybe it’s a dream, about a young woman he clearly adores. As we discover, he’s an English archaeologist just now let out of an Italian prison, returning to his ramshackle hut on a mountainside. He’s welcomed by a disreputable group of friends whom at first he rejects, but eventually falls back in with. They’re a rowdy gang of thieves who rob ancient Etruscan tombs of their valuable artifacts and then sell them on the black market. They need Arthur as their leader because he has a strange psychic talent that helps him discover these underground tombs, actually using a dowsing rod to find the general locations, and then going into a sort of trance in which he can pinpoint the spot where they need to start digging.

The marvelous Isabella Rossellini is on hand as an eccentric matriarch named Flora, who welcomes Arthur joyfully into her home where she lives with three adult daughters, because before prison he was the boyfriend of her favorite daughter Beniamina, the woman we’ve seen in the brief dreamlike opening of the film. Beniamina has gone away somewhere, but the old lady is expecting her to return any day.

Rohrwacher’s style is leisurely and richly seductive, with exquisite cinematography by Hélène Louvart. The boisterous gang of troublemakers surrounding Arthur is counterbalanced by Flora’s young servant and singing pupil Italia, played by Carol Duarte. Italia is a woman of great humor in the face of her challenges, who has two kids that she’s managed to conceal from Flora, and who presents Arthur with a beguiling mix of skepticism and affection. Arthur may be falling for her, even while his heart still dreams of the absent Beniamina. Yet nothing can tear him away from his obsession for finding ancient treasure.

In this rustic Italian landscape, in a time which seems to be before cellphones, perhaps the 1980s, we sense the presence of history underneath the old land and within the mind of this hapless dreamer. Josh O’Conner plays Arthur as if in a constant wandering reverie, lost in thought and bittersweet recollection. It’s hard to pin the character down, but the audience will find themselves rooting for him to succeed in his restless search. The gang does find a major treasure, a statue discovered in an ornate tomb, but their elaborate scheme is threatened by an unexpected rival, making wealth once more seem just out of reach.

The pull between the desire for riches and the need for love is the film’s central source of tension. The end of the movie provides a poignant and heart rending resolution. La Chimera is a haunting vision of beauty and loss.

Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is an artist of the liminal—that place between perception and symbol that we experience as mystery. This makes his films difficult, because he refuses to break things down to an easily understandable linear pattern, preferring to let meanings arise at their own pace, and not by suggestion. This was true of Drive My Car, which won the Foreign Language Oscar a couple years ago. And it’s especially true of his latest movie, Evil Does Not Exist.

I reviewed a good Iranian film recently called There is No Evil, so I was surprised to encounter another movie title that is almost identical. The meaning of that other one proved to be fairly evident if you paid attention. But in this film, the understanding, if it comes at all, is delivered through shock.

In a village located in some beautiful forest and lake country in Japan, the people live with a rhythm close to nature. The director establishes an intense feeling right away, with a lengthy sequence, accompanied by the credits, of tall trees moving within our vision, a glimpse of immensity from the point of view of our life below. Then eventually we see, it’s a young girl looking up at these trees. She’s the daughter of a local man named Takumi who is living in a cabin, chopping wood, doing odd jobs around the village. The director doesn’t shorten his actions by cutting; we see the slow pace of his life, walking with the little girl, chopping the wood, moving yet living in stillness.

After this mood has been established, we cut to a town meeting at which two young representatives of a Tokyo company are explaining a plan to build a tourist site nearby for what they call “glamping,” which is slang for glamorous camping, and this just means putting up nice little hotels instead of tents and campfires. They get an earful from the residents at this meeting. For one thing, the planned location of the septic tank is bad—the waste will go downstream to the village’s drinking water. Other aspects threaten the traditional life of the village. Takumi is one of the more eloquent persons objecting to the plan.

The two young employees, a man and a woman, are open to what they’re being told, even though their supervisors won’t budge. This sympathetic couple makes friends with Takumi, and visit him at his home where he feeds them and discusses the village’s issues. But it so happens that his daughter does not return home from school that day, and he organizes a search for her.

After the interesting and somewhat amusing town meeting scene, we may have thought that this was a conventional story with a narrative arc and so forth, but as I’ve already said, Hamaguchi always challenges what we may habitually understand about events. The ending of Evil Does Not Exist provides an unexpected jolt. It’s one of those endings that an audience will argue about later. All I can say is Hamaguchi is presenting us with something more complex and more serious than we might have thought.

Evil Does Not Exist is a strange and unsettling experience.

It’s not often that a movie manages to summarize the spiritual malaise of an entire nation, while using a kaleidoscopic hallucinatory style with shifting time periods and identities to scale the heights and plumb the depths of the human soul. I use such hyperbolic language because I find it otherwise too difficult to describe the effect of Petrov’s Flu, the extraordinary film by Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov.

We start out on a bus, with a group of sullen passengers, some of whom are arguing. Petrov, a grimy looking man in an overcoat and wool cap played by Semyon Serzin, is coughing as he pays the fare, explaining that he has the flu. Petrov’s flu, as the film is cleverly titled, will continue throughout the film. Among other things, it signals the contagious atmosphere of corruption and degradation in Russian society.

Petrov will be asked to exit the bus twice: one of the times, where he’s made to serve in a firing squad, only occurs, it would appear, in his fantasy. The film thus begins its full-length strategy of presenting thoughts and fantasies as objectively happening, and this shifting back and forth between the world and realms of the mind is one of the more exciting and challenging aspects of Petrov’s Flu.

The story takes place in the year 2000 or thereabouts, at the very beginning of Putin’s first term, although of course Putin is never named. The movie expands into multiple characters. Petrov’s ex-wife works at a library, and while working late because of a poetry workshop, she hears one of the old poets being sexist. Her eyes go black, and she then beats the living hell out of him, as if she was some kind of super ninja. I should say that sudden violence does occur in the film, although in this case it comes off as hilarious. And once again, fantasy.

Like a dream, the film coalesces around several odd locations. One is a van in which Petrov and his sinister friend Igor is riding in the back with a dead guy in a coffin. Later, the story goes around that the dead man got out of the coffin and walked away. A grotesque resurrection as metaphor for Russian life.

In the film’s middle section, another of Petrov’s friends, an aspiring but bitter author who’s threatening suicide (reminding me of Dostoevsky’s fiction) is the subject of a spectacular 18-minute tracking shot through multiple locations, both real and imagined. The film’s technique is constantly surprising.

Another odd place is a New Year’s party for children in which the legendary Snow Maiden helps light a tree. Home movie style footage shows Petrov as a child, with his weird but protective parents, who are apparently nudists at home. At the end of this flashback, of which we’ve already had an earlier foreshadowing, he is holding the Snow Maiden’s hand at the party asking her if she’s real. “Yes, I’m real,” she says, “and you have a fever.”

Back in the present the young son of Petrov and Petrova has also caught the flu, with a dangerously high fever, and we explore the fear and desperation about possibly losing a child, especially in Petrov’s frantic imagination, which by the way we discover is that of a comic book artist.

Finally, the movie takes a startling turn. We’re in black and white now, the time appears to be the ‘70s, and we have a completely new main character, a young blonde woman. Who is she? Where have we seen her before? Petrov’s Flu is an extravagant and unsparing vision of our predicament.

A fortunate director can point to one picture in which all the elements came together to create something close to perfection. In the case of the great Ernst Lubitsch, the man who brought continental sophistication to Hollywood, that movie was Trouble in Paradise, released in 1932. It was Lubtisch’s favorite among his own films, and posterity has been almost unanimous in proclaiming it his best.

Gaston and Lily (played by Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins) are lovers in Paris. They are also high class jewel thieves. To pull off the biggest heist of their careers, they insinuate themselves into the confidence of the wealthy Madame Colet (played by Kay Francis). Unfortunately, Gaston finds himself falling for the charming widow.

The dialogue (by Laszlo Aladar who also wrote the Astaire-Rogers classic Top Hat), is polished and witty, employing all the virtues of drawing room comedy, while at the same time poking fun at the pretensions of that genre. Lubitsch’s camera placement and timing couldn’t be better. With its brightly lit, purposely artificial set design, marvelous costumes, and creamy visual texture, the film represents the height of early Paramount style. It is also devoid of moralistic twaddle. The main characters are thieves with no apologies, and the movie makes it clear that their rich victims are just thieves of another order. Trouble in Paradise has an air of freedom from hypocrisy, and that makes it escapism in the best sense, a joyous relief from ponderousness. It was made, of course, just prior to the imposition of the Production Code, which put a damper on creativity in American film. That Madame Colet has taken her secretary (Marshall) as a lover, or that in fact people do go to bed with one another without being married (as silly as it seems to say this nowadays), is as clear as can be without ever being stated explicitly.

And then we have dialogue such as the following between Hopkins and Marshall: “This woman has more than jewelry. Did you ever take a good look at her….” “Certainly.” “They’re all right, aren’t they?” “Beautiful. What of it? As far as I’m concerned, her whole sex appeal is in that safe.” “Oh, Gaston. Let’s open it right now. Let’s get away from here.” “No, sweetheart. There’s more sex appeal coming on the first of the month – 850 thousand francs.” And so forth. They also have a routine (imitated many times since in lesser films) where they pick each other’s pockets while being romantic. At one point Gaston says, “You don’t mind if I keep your garter?” which he produces from his pocket, giving it a little kiss.

Herbert Marshall, whom I usually find unbearably wooden, is perfect here as an urbane rascal. The underappreciated Kay Francis has marvelous energy and wit: her scenes with Marshall are delicious. If I had to make one complaint (I know, it is heresy to make any), it would be that Miriam Hopkins overdoes things somewhat in her part. She seems a bit too coarse, I think, but this is a mere quibble. With good supporting work from Edward Everett Horton and Charles Ruggles, Trouble in Paradise is a paragon of light entertainment, one of the best examples of what the studio system in Hollywood, with the right mix of talent, could achieve.

Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés has made a major creative leap in her second film, Tótem. Her excellent debut, The Chambermaid, was focused on a day in the life of one isolated character, a housekeeping employee at a big hotel. Now, five years later, her sophomore effort is a gorgeous multi-character ensemble piece.

Tótem opens with Sol, a seven-year old girl, in a public restroom with her mother Lucia, who is helping her get ready for a birthday celebration for her father, Tonatiuh. Lucia has an appointment and can’t be there until later, so she drops the girl off at her grandfather’s house. The camera takes Sol’s point of view for the most part, as she wanders through the house while her father’s two sisters, Nuria and Alejandra, busily prepare for the party. Nuria is drinking and trying to bake a cake while her own little daughter climbs on the counter getting into mischief. But where is the father? We find out soon enough, as the film takes us to his room, where he lies in bed, obviously very sick, being tended by their kind female Indian servant Cruz. Tona, a relatively young looking artist, has cancer, and the foreboding of his death will hang over the celebration, and the movie. Even as the guests start to arrive, Tona won’t come out of his room for a long time. Sol, as we find out, knows he’s sick, but not yet how bad it really is.

Avilés manages to make every character distinct and memorable. The family is loving, but not without problems, as you can tell by the way the aunts bicker about little things. Alejandra has invited a psychic to come over to do healing rituals for Tona. This strange woman roams around the house burning sage, saying that the wall paintings (clearly done by Tona himself) are too negative, and even burning a piece of bread as part of her routine. The grandfather, who has to use an electrolarynx to speak, rasps “I’m not in the mood for your satantic bull,” and it’s all low-key amusing, but never coarsely so. Avilés balances the humor, wonder, conflict, and sadness throughout the picture, maintaining a mood of wistful, anticipatory grief.

The film’s beauty is assured by the presence of the girl playing Sol, one of Avilés’s fortunate discoveries, Naíma Sentíes. In the opening scene in the restroom, Sol makes a wish that her father won’t die. The rest of the movie is a gradual revelation for her and us, the audience. Her mother, who eventually shows up, is evidently no longer living with her father. Her relatives, concentrated on getting ready, acknowledge her but don’t interact with her very much. She spends more time looking at various animals in the house: a cat, several dogs, a fish, a praying mantis, and a bunch of snails that she begins to carefully put on each of the wall paintings.

It’s not clear to me why the film is called Tótem. For what it’s worth, the father’s name Tonatiuh, is also the name of an Aztec sun god, and Sol is a Latin name for the sun. But symbolism is always in a minor key here, never overt. The picture is about mortality and our relationship to it. It’s never dreary or slow—the effect is of a transforming intimacy. When Tona finally comes out of his room into the party at the end, his daughter’s recognition of the truth is marvelously conveyed without words.

There’s something almost unbearably touching about Tótem. It’s a quiet masterwork.

Here Bertolucci found a chance to express his political ideas, and another outlet for his love of working on an epic scale. The government of China gave him permission to film in the Forbidden City, and his version of that historical environment, with its archaic pageantry and poisonous isolation, is awesome in detail, as the movie’s flow of imagery and color is as well. The bright reds in the scenes of childhood form a meaningful contrast with the drab grays and blues of the scenes in the prison.

More important than the film’s formal technique, however, is its use of the epic form to portray an unusual vantage point on modern history. Pu Yi represents the ancient ways, the heirarchy that had ruled for centuries, but which was already on the way out at the time of his birth. He thus stands at a crossroads, a figure stuck in the past through no choice of his own, literally imprisoned by his own rule as emperor, and, despite an urge to escape to the outer world, mentally imprisoned as well. The emperor is really a pawn, and later, by his own tragic choice, he becomes a puppet of the Japanese. Thus the great spectacle of modern history is displayed from the point of view of a supposed leader, who is actually almost a passive observer swept along by the tide, just as millions of victims were swept along by the murderous forces let loose in that deadly 20th century.

John Lone plays the adult Pu Yi with a fragile, tentative sort of dignity. We can see the young man struggling to maintain the pretence of power. The later scenes in Manchuria, when he has fooled himself into reprising the role of emperor with Japanese support, are heartbreaking. Slowly it dawns on him that he has chosen complete ruin for his lot. In the role of the empress, Joan Chen expertly portrays the transformation from loving hearted girl to bitterly disillusioned woman. Peter O’Toole lends his arch, amusing English manner to the role of the Emperor’s tutor, Johnston. His performance is almost hypnotic.

Success sometimes has a way of inspiring skepticism. The Last Emperor ended up winning nine Academy Awards, including best picture and director, and one of the unexpected results of this is that the film gained the stuffy aura of respectability. More than one critic has complained that the title character is too passive, as if that wasn’t exactly the point. Admittedly, Bertolucci is missing a certain something—I’m tempted to call it “soul” for lack of a better word—that would deepen his film and allow the elements to cohere in a way that strikes the heart. But rather than wish that the director had genius in addition to talent, I choose to appreciate what he did attain: a remarkable view into a world of ancestral greatness that has become ineffectual. In its sly fashion, The Last Emperor is saying that the individual nowadays, faced with the nightmare of history, would most likely wish for the same thing as the emperor turned humble gardener—to be left in peace.

The time is 1901, the place is Chile. A group of peons are putting up a fence in the middle of a fierce wind. One of the workers falls to the ground, unable to continue because of a bad arm. A man on horseback wearing the red coat of a British soldier comes up the hill. The worker begs for his life, but the British man shoots him dead on the spot. Another worker, an Indian, witnesses this. In his eyes we see him realize the terror of the situation. Thus begins The Settlers, the debut film of Chilean director Felipe Gálvez, a gripping testament of the truth behind the modern colonial history of Chile.

MacLennan, the British soldier, works for a wealthy Chilean rancher. He’s been given a new mission, to go south to Tierra del Fuego, the land at the southern tip of South America, grab whatever land he can, claiming it for Chile, and find a route to the sea for the rancher’s sheep to be driven for transport to overseas markets. He lines up the fence workers and has each of them shoot a rifle at targets that he’s set up. The Indian with the fierce gaze, whose name is Segundo, turns out to be a crack shot. So MacLennan chooses him to come along on his journey. It’s not as if he has a choice. It’s obvious from the fate of the worker that was killed that these peons are essentially enslaved by the rancher and his men. As they’re leaving, they’re joined by a third man, Bill, a mercenary from Texas assigned by the boss to accompany MacLennan and make sure he accomplishes his mission.

The bulk of the movie then follows these three horsemen as they travel through the stark mountainous lands of Patagonia. MacLennan is a man who drinks a lot and is subject to fits of rage. The tension is heightened because Bill, the man from Texas, hates Indians and is always complaining that you can’t trust Segundo, whom he calls “the half breed.” Bill is often hinting that they should just kill Segundo and go on without him, apparently assuming that the Indian only understands Spanish and not English.

The excellent color cinematography highlights the awesome and forbidding landscape, with the three men often dwarfed by the gigantic natural scenery of this arid wilderness. Soon, Segundo discovers the sickening truth—their mission includes murdering any and all native people that they encounter. Trigger warning here: The Settlers features horrifying scenes of massacre and abuse. Segundo is forced to participate in these crimes, or his white bosses will murder him as well. Even a sequence where they meet a group of land surveyors mapping the border between Chile and Argentina ends up devolving into a wrestling and fist fighting contest. It all culminates in an encounter with a rogue band of fighters led by a fierce British colonel, played by Sam Spruell, an impressive performer whom I recognized from the most recent season of the TV show Fargo.

Galvez is determined to trace Chile’s history back to the roots of violent settlement and displacement of indigenous Chileans. The film’s final section carefully displays how native people were quite deliberately turned into helpless figures of the country’s so-called cultural heritage. The Settlers is a film of uncompromising power.

In Paris, an orphaned waif named Diane (played by Janet Gaynor) is whipped and almost murdered by her vicious sister Nana (Gladys Brockwell). The girl’s life is saved by Chico (Charles Farrell), a sewer worker embittered against God for his bad luck. When the police come to take Diane away on Nana’s instigation, Chico claims that they are married in order to protect her. They must keep up this pretense for awhile, so Diane moves into Chico’s little flat on the seventh floor of a tenement. He’s a bit insensitive, and a braggart too, but their arrangement gradually turns into love. Then the advent of the Great War forces them apart.

The story, based on a play by Austin Strong, is extreme melodrama, and in less talented hands it could have been pure schmaltz, but Borzage knew how to combine passion with a kind of ethereal spirituality, and this is reflected in the film’s look, especially the lighting and camera movement. The nighttime sequences, and the action in the little attic and on the rooftops, seem almost lit from within, as if suffused with romantic memories. The crane shots with the lovers running up to the seventh floor, the overhead shots of Paris (these are all Hollywood sets of course), Gaynor walking across a plank through the window in a wedding dress, Farrell holding her up in the air when he declares his love, a ray of light falling on the couple—the picture is filled with such beauty, like an intoxicating and sometimes feverish dream.

The plot becomes even more outlandish during the separation of the lovers by war. The villainous sister returns, and then the tragedies pile up. Meanwhile, Diane and Chico are shown to have a supernatural connection with one another. They communicate across time and space. Nowadays we’ve grown out of these kinds of dramatic devices, but with Borzage we willingly suspend disbelief most of the time. What I find most interesting is that this elevated notion of love is at the same time grounded in the life of Paris and in relationships with friends. Spiritual love, for Borzage, does not retreat from the world, but transfigures it.

The 20-year-old Gaynor is luminous. This was the big year in which she also starred in Sunrise, and won the Best Actress award for Seventh Heaven and Street Angel, another Borzage film. She has great chemistry with Farrell, and after Seventh Heaven became a smash hit they were paired together eleven more times. Now, after years of being unavailable, Seventh Heaven has been released by Fox, in an excellent print, as part of a Borzage box set.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a movie whose hard-to-remember Latin title seems designed not to attract viewers, is a fascinating documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel. They got the world’s attention in 2012 with their film Leviathan. Leviathan used innovative techniques, including tiny water-proof cameras and immersive sound design, to show the workings of a commercial fishing vessel in the North Atlantic. In their latest film, they take us inside of a number of hospitals in Paris. The title, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, is from a groundbreaking 16th century anatomy text by Andreas Vaselius. In English it means “The Fabric of the Human Body,” and if you’re interested in watching, you can search by that title.

This is not only about the body, though. We observe many doctors, nurses, staff, and patients in these hospitals, and this footage is so intimate that I wondered how they pulled it off. People have strengths and flaws, of course, but the film favors the more general day-to-day behavior that is simply part of the process, yet is rarely depicted in medical dramas. The staff are dedicated to serving patients respectfully and with an eye to the best outcomes. But they also talk frankly among themselves, and one notices how strong emotions are carefully avoided in order to serve efficiently, avoidance that can at times sound like callousness. We meet a few patients as well—there’s a man who is awake and talking while the surgeons bore holes in his head, and in another wing, a man who wanders about in his dementia until staff members carefully persuade him to return to his room. It is unfortunately no surprise to find that the hospitals are inadequately funded and understaffed. The hospital morgue is always full. Considering this fact allowed me to appreciate the work being performed as vital and amazing, despite one alarming example of incompetence during a colonoscopy.

Most remarkable are the numerous filmed surgeries and procedures, from removing a prostate gland to brain surgery, breast cancer, delivering a child via cesarian, and more. The doctors chat somewhat casually while performing these stressful tasks. Most of the time we are seeing through the microscopic cameras showing the tunnel-like insides of people with the equally tiny surgical tools used to do the complicated work. We see a lot of this incredible internal footage, and I realize some people don’t want to see this, and would not be a surgeon for that reason. In my case, though, after a short time, all the blood and organs and squishy stuff stopped bothering me. I was able to watch it long enough to attain something akin to the real-life composure required by doctors and nurses when dealing with the human body. The reality begins to seem abstract, an organic world separate from any personal association. Then, if in the midst of this hidden realm, we think of the actual people on the operating table, a profound sense of wonder can result.

In the finale, we go to a dance club where the doctors go after work. As Gloria Gaynor sings “I Will Survive,” the camera slowly pans across a huge painting on the walls, featuring a wealth of symbolic medical imagery.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica, The Fabric of the Human Body, is as precise as the surgeries in it.

Trenque Lauquen, a film by Argentine director Laura Citarella, presents a two-part mystery. First, the mystery of things we investigate to learn more about them. Second, the mystery of things that are beyond what we can fully know.

The story takes place in and around Trenque Lauquen, a small city in central Argentina. Laura, a young botanist played by Laura Paredes, has gone missing, and her boyfriend, a university professor played by Rafael Spregelburd, searches the area trying to find her, with the help of her married friend Chicho, played by Ezequiel Pierri. Chicho is at first a baffling and rather amusing character, a shaggy teddy bear type of guy, who responds to someone talking to him with thoughtful silence much of the time, hardly ever smiling, even appearing a bit dumb, but we eventually find that there’s a lot more to him.

The film jumps back in time where we see that Chicho was assisting Laura in the search for samples of different types of orchids, and that she needed one more plant to complete her study. But one day, as they meet at her favorite restaurant, she tells him that she has stumbled upon a mystery, one that has nothing to do with plants. It so happens that Laura also does guest spots on a local radio news show about women’s history. She checked a book out of the library called “Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Women” by a Russian author (I found out later that this was a real book), and hidden between some glued pages she found a love letter. Following clues contained in the letter, she checked out other books and found more letters. A married man, who it turns out was a wealthy Italian landowner, wrote these deeply passionate and erotic letters many years ago to a local woman teacher, who then hid them all in these books that were donated to the library after she died. Who exactly were these lovers, and in what circumstances did they meet? Laura enlists Chicho to help solve the mystery.

Laura Paredes, who co-wrote the screenplay with Citarella, draws us totally into her character’s curious and imaginative world. She is the star whose presence is felt throughout the film, even in scenes where she’s absent. As Chicho helps Laura find evidence about the two mystery lovers, we can see him gradually falling in love with her. Meanwhile we still follow the boyfriend Rafael in his search, and the contrast between his rigid, uptight personality and what we have seen of Laura’s intuitive openness is remarkable.

Trenque Lauquen is a four-hour film, originally screened in two separate two-hour parts. Citarella’s style is sensuous, beguiling, and featuring many shifts back and forth in time. In part two, Laura’s discovery of the missing variety of orchid leads to a new mystery about a strange creature, either a feral child or an animal. This part becomes an increasingly enigmatic dive into questions about identity—of oneself, of women, of our being in nature without our customary labels, of that within is which is unknowable.

Trenque Lauquen is a beautiful tapestry of stories within stories, just the kind of free-spirited film that I admire.

In 1831, Victor Hugo wrote one of his most popular novels, “Notre-Dame de Paris.” In English translation it was renamed The Hunchback of Notre Dame, after its main character, a deformed bell ringer at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in 15th-century Paris named Quasimodo. The story tells of a gypsy dancer, Esmerelda, who unfortunately falls under the lustful eye of the cathedral’s archdeacon Claude Frollo. When she rejects his advances, he frames her in a murder, but as she’s about to be publicly executed, Quasimodo, whom she had shown some kindness to earlier, swoops down with a rope from Notre Dame to rescue her and keep in the cathedral under the church law known as “sanctuary.” The novel has since been made into plays, musicals, operas, and a lot of movies. There’s something about this tale that touches people; I think mainly the idea that someone shunned in society for his looks can be lovable, and even a hero.

When Lon Chaney played Quasimodo in the 1923 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had already been four previous versions made. But this one, from Universal, was that studio’s biggest and most profitable production in the silent era. An astounding reproduction of the cathedral was constructed on the studio back lot, and there were huge crowd scenes. Lon Chaney had made his name transforming himself into strange characters. Quasimodo was his most elaborate creation up to then, in which he contorted his body and designed genius-level makeup to portray this scary-looking man that we ultimately grow to care about. It’s a fine performance.

However, movie technique before the late ‘20s was still often tentative. The director, Wallace Worsley, was a reliable but rather pedestrian studio hand. The film also has the melodramatic overacting, and banality of script and pacing that were acceptable then but difficult to put with now.

Sixteen years later, in the next version, from RKO in 1939, English actor Charles Laughton made a triumphant return to Hollywood playing Quasimodo. Undergoing an impressively grotesque makeup job, he brings out the pathos of the hunchback character in convincing fashion. Once having seen this performance, you won’t forget it. Laughton was smart enough to know that he could emphasize the character’s idiotic side, and his potential for menace, without diminishing our sympathy. The picture is a glorious, old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle, but he makes it seem like more than that.

Maureen O’Hara, in her American debut, plays Esmerelda. She’s stunningly beautiful, if not exactly gypsy-like. Rounding out the excellent cast is Cedric Hardwicke as the villain Rollo, who plays his part with a gloomy implacability that attains just the right tone of self-righteous malevolence.

The talented director, William Dieterle, let his impressionistic tendencies run free, with beautifully choreographed crowd scenes, dynamic moving camera, and a talent for bringing night scenes to life. The costumes, scenery, and production design represent the studio system at its finest. This is widely regarded as the best film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and I would have to agree. The final shot, with Laughton talking mournfully to a gargoyle, is among the most moving cinematic images of all time.

A satire about a Black literary novelist who publishes a trashy book under a pseudonym to mock the way African Americans are depicted, only to see the book become a best seller.

American Fiction is, on the surface, a film satire on how African American stories are marketed by the publishing industry. But more than that, it’s about the representation of race in popular culture, and how Black Americans are forced to deal with such misconceptions in their lives. With such a weighty subject, you might not expect the film to be funny, but it is. It’s based on a 2001 novel by Percival Everett called “Erasure,” and first-time director Cord Jefferson has adapted it with only minor changes.

Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed “Monk” doubtless because of legendary pianist Thelonious Monk. And the last name, Ellison, is surely meant to invoke the great Black writer Ralph Ellison. Monk is an English professor in Los Angeles, and the author of several works of literary fiction. Monk’s novels are intellectually complex and subtle in style. The critics praise his work, but not many people buy it. Frustrated by this perceived failure, he responds to a comment in class involving race by lashing out. The university makes him take a break to go to Boston for a seminar. Boston is his home town, so it’s a chance to connect with family as well.

At the seminar he attends an interview with a black woman author whose new novel, which has done very well, panders to “ghetto” stereotypes such as poor illiterate unwed mothers and such. This really bothers Monk, who then writes a short novel, in an exaggerated “ebonics” type language, about a black criminal in the ghetto, signs it “Stagg R. Leigh,” and sends it to his agent as a joke. As it turns out, the joke’s on him. The agent, genially played by John Ortiz, asks if he can publish the book under the pseudonym. After some hesitation, Monk agrees. Surprise! A major publishing house offers him a $750,000 dollar advance, and the novel goes on to become a best seller.

This then is the comic premise, from which the film gets a lot of mileage. The absurdity just keeps building, with the white publishing executives depicted as farcical empty-headed culture vultures, and although we know this is an exaggeration, it’s still funny.

Besides all this, however, is the story of Monk’s family, with which he reunites on this trip: his aged mother, played by Leslie Uggams, a supportive sister, and a gay brother who has had issues with Monk in the past. He also meets a potential romantic partner, played by Erika Alexander.

Here I think the film is gently poking some fun at another African American genre: the middle class family drama. But the picture is also meant to be sincere, and Jefferson, the director, makes it work—most of the time. A native of Tucson, he’s had success as a writer on TV, and this is his debut film, so there are bound to be rookie mistakes. But there aren’t many people who win an Oscar for their first film, and Jefferson deservedly won it for his adapted screenplay.

Then there’s Jeffrey Wright. He’s one of our best living actors. Here he ably carries the movie, vividly conveying Monk’s isolation and alienation, which causes him to push people away, but at the same time Wright convinces us of his basic decency.

American Fiction ends with a very clever and funny meta-narrative offering multiple endings. It’s the one major detail that wasn’t in the book, a highly original flash of brilliance from Cord Jefferson.

Among those deeply affected by this work is the film director Ava DuVernay, who decided to make a movie from it. It’s called Origin, and it’s that rare example of a movie about ideas that is also convincing as drama.

Du Vernay has made documentaries before, and she could have taken that approach here, to try to explain the book in a non-fiction format. But she’s also proven to be a skilled director of narrative film, and to bring the book’s message to life, she decided to dramatize the story of how Wilkerson came to write it, using actors and story techniques. It’s a risky strategy, and I admit I was expecting a kind of weak personal framing of what would really amount to a lecture, because I had seen this in other films with similar approaches. But I was happy to be proven wrong.

Origin begins with a tense depiction of the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black kid from Florida gunned down by a neighborhood vigilante while walking through a white neighborhood. This is a brilliant way to start the movie, creating a sense of urgency that doesn’t let up. We then meet Isabel Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist elevated to independent status by the great success of her first book. She’s asked by a friend on the New York Times to consider covering this Trayvon Martin case for the paper. She declines, not wishing to do assignment work anymore, but after her friend plays the phone recordings leading up to the killing, she can’t get it out of her mind. How, she wonders, can racism explain why a Latino, a brown skinned man, killed a black kid, Trayvon Martin?

Origin seamlessly weaves together the private and public aspects of the story. Wilkerson, a black woman, is married to a white man, a financial analyst named Brett, played by John Bernthal. Whatever resonance this may have in a film dealing with equality, the fact is that the performances make the relationship intensely believable. The affection and humor they share becomes a thread holding the film together. We also meet Isabel’s mother and her beloved cousin. Losses experienced in this close personal circle result in overwhelming grief. DuVernay proves expert at portraying the process of grief. But the power in all this, and in the film as a whole, I think, is largely due to the lead actress, Aunjaunue Ellis-Taylor, who carries the film with such conviction that I found myself deeply moved.

Wilkerson travels around the world to study the history of social injustice. In India, the idea of caste clarifies her thinking about the sources of oppression. It’s exciting to see a film so engaged by important ideas. Origin unites the depth of human emotion with the passion of intellectual discovery in a quest to understand and thereby free ourselves.

There have been a series of thefts from teachers in the school, and administrators don’t have much to go on. When two kids on the student council are questioned, they cast suspicion on a boy of Turkish ethnicity. An administrative teams goes into a classroom, orders all the girls to leave, then has the boys give up their wallets to be searched. The Turkish kid is found to be carrying a large amount of cash. But this ends up being a false lead, and in addition makes the school look bad.

The classroom that was disrupted by this maneuver is that of a teacher named Carla, played by Leonie Benesch. Unhappy at the way this was handled, Carla decides that she will try to identify the real culprit in the thefts. Money and valuables had been stolen from some teachers’ belongings, so in the teachers’ lounge one day, she turns on a video camera in her open laptop, then leaves her coat with a wallet in a pocket as she exits the lounge for a time. Sure enough, when she comes back to the room, there’s money missing from the wallet. Then she looks at the video. It shows someone going into the coat pocket, but the only identifier she can see is the thief’s light shirt with a pastel colored star pattern. So Carla walks around nearby looking for such a pattern, and finally seeing it on the blouse of the school secretary. She confronts the secretary, who becomes furious, then she goes to the principal. The secretary is called in and shown the video. At this point we might expect her to confess, but instead she acts shocked and angry that she is being accused. She then gets fired. When the truth about the incident comes out, some are offended at Carla’s use of a hidden camera, which actually violates school privacy rules, Thus begins a crisis that ends up seeing everybody—teachers, parents, administrators, students—picking sides and pointing fingers.

I remember Benesch from one of my favorite TV series, Babylon Berlin. Here she gives a performance of intense concentrated energy, trying to stay centered in the midst of a swirling controversy. The film is a subtle, involving, and believable drama, with an occasional hint of low-key satire. The issues of who holds the power, of what really constitutes proof, of the rights of children, of what are true principles and what are just prejudices, are all conveyed against the small-scale background of this 7th grade class.

The focus ends up being on one of Carla’s favorite students, Oskar, the son of the accused secretary, who begins acting out in rage against what he says is a false accusation against his mother. The difficult dynamic between Carla and Oskar becomes the central symptom of dysfunction, rather than the supposed mystery of who was stealing. There’s a stubbornness and defiance in this boy’s heart that ultimately is a greater force than everyone in the school united against him. The Teachers’ Lounge wisely leaves us without trite answers, but only with an agonized self-questioning for those who seek to wield authority over others.

For the majority of movie history, the directors have been mostly men. In Hollywood’s silent era, women played key roles as screenwriters and editors, and in some cases, as directors. But after the studio system was developed in the sound era, when big business finally saw that there was a lot of money to be made, men moved in and took over most of the positions, with women being discouraged in society at the time from being in the work force at all.

During the so-called classic era, from the 1930s through the mid-‘40s, there was literally only one woman director in Hollywood: Dorothy Arzner. And I invite you to look up Dorothy Arzner and watch some of her movies, which had the stamp of an individual style. In the late 1940s through the ‘50s, Ida Lupino, who’d started as an actress, made a series of important films that demonstrated a new kind of realism in American cinema. They’re both getting the attention they deserve, finally. But male dominance has still been the default condition in film, not just in the U.S., but worldwide.

Well, there’s been some progress since then. Agnès Varda in the French New Wave, followed by Chantal Akerman, Larisa Shepitko in Russia, Mai Zetterling in Sweden, Věra Chytilová  in Czechoslovakia, Margarethe von Trotta in Germany, Lina Wertmüller in Italy, and Márta Mészáros in Hungary, among others, achieved breakthroughs as movie directors. We started to learn some of what we had been missing. Traditional films were largely about men, with women as romantic objects or otherwise in support of the male narrative. The point of view portrayed in most films failed to show women as their own protagonists, or convey the sensibility of women outside of their relationship to men. The emergence of female directors meant an enrichment of experience, a widening to include a fuller spectrum of human events, feelings, and ideas.

A few of the women directors working now that I admire are: Claire Denis, who has given us 35 years of excellence, in boldly experimental films like Beau Travail and White Material, interrogating the inner lives of men and women characters in provocative and challenging ways. Lucrecia Martel, the brilliant Argentinian director, whose films such as La Ciénaga, The Holy Girl, and Zama display a sophisticated multilayered style in stories dealing with family conflict, religious yearnings, class differences, and colonial history. Jane Campion from New Zealand and Gillian Armstrong from Australia. Kelly Reichardt, artist of real life, whose film Showing Up was one of my favorites from last year. Ava DuVernay, whose recent film Origin continues her career explorations of social justice. Debra Granik, Sarah Polley, Céline Sciamma, Greta Gerwig, Kathryn Bigelow, who was the first woman to win an Oscar for directing, and Chloe Zhao, who was the second.

These women are making great films. It seems like a marvelous new era in cinema, and yet at the same time, it’s not enough. We need more women not only as directors but in every aspect of film production, not merely for the sake of inclusion, but because it revitalizes film.  Progress has been too slow. The struggle continues. And in the meantime, take the trouble to find films made by women, and watch them.

You probably know already that LGBT people were among the groups persecuted by Nazi Germany. After the war, the concentration camps ended, but sexual relations between men, as detailed in the German Criminal Code Paragraph 175, from 1871, was still a crime. Great Freedom, directed by Sebastian Meise, tells the story of a gay man named Hans, played by Franz Rogowski, who goes in and out of prison, mostly in, for decades, all for the crime of being gay.

The film opens with Hans getting busted for anonymous sex, some time in the 1960s. In prison we realize he’s been here before. There’s a man named Viktor, played by Georg Friedrich, who greets him sardonically, more like an old enemy than a friend. Soon, the movie cuts to the time period right after the war ended. Hans has been transferred from a slave labor camp to regular prison. He meets his cell mate, Victor, who looks at him with hostility, especially when he discovers Hans’s crime. But he does notice that a number is tattooed on Hans’s arm. And on his part, we discover, he is a heroin addict, and Hans cleverly bargains an ability to get access to needles in exchange for Viktor tattooing over the number on his arm so you can’t see it. This is Hans—someone always seeking ways to survive, and finding ingenious ways to do it.

If you’re thinking that this will be a sentimental story about how a gay Jewish man and a homophobic thug learn to love one another, you need to watch a different movie. There is raw emotion in Great Freedom, but no sentimentality. Meise now cuts forward in time—we’re in the 1950s, and Hans is going to great lengths to find opportunities to have sex with his lover, and we learn that they knew each other on the outside. Viktor is still around, but not a cellmate this time—his volatility makes him a threat. The film keeps cutting back between the ‘40s, ‘50s, and’60s, and you can tell which period you’re in by the length or style of Hans’s hair, and other clues, including a dominant color scheme for each period.

Right now, Rogowski is really one of the finest living actors we have. I’ve said it before, but this performance is above and beyond anything he’s done yet. Very controlled, intense, manifesting the determined energy of this resourceful character, who shows so much bravery. Is he a hero? Not in the usual sense, because Miese and Rogowski have constructed such a complex character that we also are forced to see the fatalism, the shame and sense of self-degradation, that imprison him in addition to the physical prison, that create a mirror image of the misery imposed on him by the state. As for the relationship with Viktor, it encompasses a world of suffering, but also a depth beyond words.

I’m not in the habit of giving warnings about films. But here I do need to say that this is a film of blistering emotional intensity. To take it in means being willing to see into the heart of darkness. Its effect on me was, metaphorically speaking of course, like having a spike driven through my heart. Yet despite that, Great Freedom contains a flaming ember of hope.

Paragraph 175 was largely decriminalized in 1969. It was finally abolished in 1994.

In 1999, “transgender” wasn’t a well-known term, at least not in mainstream culture. That was the year a film called Boys Don’t Cry was released, directed by Kimberley Peirce, and written by Peirce and Andy Bienen. It dramatizes the real-life story of Teena Brandon, who changed her name to Brandon Teena and passed for a young man in a small Nebraska town.

The movie is beautifully crafted, with intensely vulnerable acting, and pervaded with feelings of longing and sadness. Over it all hangs a sense of menace, forebodings of the bad things that can happen when someone steps over the lines of gender. Peirce’s visual sense is dark and moody. From time to time the drama is punctuated with shots of clouds over the night prairie, flashes of electrical storms, set to the sounds of a mournful guitar.

The biggest success of Boys Don’t Cry lies in the performances Peirce gets from her actors. Hilary Swank is a remarkable Brandon—brilliant at showing the desperate need to belong as a man, with all the high risk-taking and on-the-edge quality that would imply for someone who was biologically a woman. Swank captures this lonely character, profoundly unaware of himself, without a long-range plan, just living for the next moment. It is not a gimmicky performance. You may recall that Swank won her first Oscar for this film.

Even so, I think the film might not have worked without the right actress to play Lana, the woman Brandon falls in love with. Chloë Sevigny is devastating in this part. Lana gradually falls for the young man, so different from the men she hangs out with, and Sevigny shows us her heart-wrenching transformation as the truth about Brandon comes out. It’s a deepening of character, so moving and so right, and in a way she represents a possible response to the challenge posed by Brandon, a response of love that stays true to itself against all odds, which is stirring, tragic and truthful.

Brandon’s journey is meaningful because it calls into question the whole cultural edifice of gender. The roles that we play in society, the qualities we exhibit and those we hide, the feelings we have about ourselves, are powerfully influenced by ideas of what it means to be male or female. The experience of Brandon is that the human spectrum is by necessity much wider than this narrow band which is imposed by our culture.

The film also demonstrates this through the characters of two young men, John and Tom, expertly played by Peter Sarsgaard and Brendan Sexton III. They’re hard-drinking and rebellious, full of swagger and violence. It’s tempting to distance ourselves and look at them as mere villains. Peirce undermines that temptation in subtle ways. There’s a scene where Tom deliberately puts his hand in a fire, and shows Brandon the marks where he’s cut himself. This is a perfect symbol for the way a man has had to deny and suppress his feelings, his capacity to be hurt or afraid or to grieve, in order to survive as a man. And at some level, tough guy John seems to sense denied aspects of himself in Brandon.

Peirce’s treatment of Brandon’s ultimate fate is unflinching. We are made to look squarely at the violence of retaliation. The movie can be a shattering experience to watch, but I think there was no other way for Peirce to present the full force and meaning of the story. 25 years later, Boys Don’t Cry retains a stunning urgency.

It was a good year for movies, if your viewing is not confined to Hollywood films. Many of the best reflected the unease of our times.

Here is my annual “favorites” list: as I’ve explained before, I do this a couple of months later than most film critics because the quality pictures from late in the previous year take longer to get to my neck of the woods than to LA, New York, or Chicago. I also need to say that some films, especially those in languages other than English, may take from a year to a year and a half to be available for viewing here in the States. So there are more than a few films on my list that are technically dated from 2022, or even ‘21.

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) is really in a class by itself. Ostensibly about a happy German family—mother, father, and five children—living in a prosperous home with servants, a flower garden, and swimming pool, we soon discover that the father is Rudolf Höss, a high-ranking Nazi officer, and their home is located right next to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, of which he is the commandant. The idea is as simple and as chilling as that, yet Glazer keeps building on this premise to ever greater heights. It’s not just that the everyday interactions and minor struggles of this family convey a grotesque absurdity in the light of what we, the audience, know. It’s that we experience a kind of existential terror through the movie’s depiction of people treating as ordinary that which should freeze the soul of anyone with a conscience. We are forced to implicate ourselves in the normalizing of the unthinkable. The Zone of Interest is one of the most profound meditations on evil ever filmed.

A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjiong) is a masterful epic telling the story of a fictional Chinese opera troupe which covers the tragic and tumultuous history of China from the 1920s through the’70s. The style features the brilliant artificiality of the theater, with its masks, costumes and painted sets, alongside extensive tracking shots that places the viewer in the midst of the symbolic procession of the long and eventful life of a famous clown. A framing device shows this old man being confronted after his death by two spirits of the underworld, who accompany him to the afterlife while he reminisces about the many phases of his career. The film takes a darkly skeptical point of view about Chinese politics and its upheavals, the title signaling how the underlying conditions of social oppression are unchanged despite the superficial claims of revolution.

Alcarràs (Carla Simón) is an exquisitely composed film telling of an extended family of peach farmers in the Catalonia region of Spain. They are about to lose the farm to an owner that wants to convert the land for industrial use, and in this difficult process we experience the family from the point of view of each of its members, from the parents, uncles and aunts to the teenage children and little kids. Simón’s supple and versatile style brings this little vanishing world to rich and engaging life. Alcarràs translates our bond to the land we live on into beautiful, heart-rending poetry.

Unrest (Cyril Schäublin) clarifies the history of modern political struggle by taking us to an earlier, more fundamental period. In 1877, in a village in Switzerland, the owners of a clock and watch factory are trying to create the quickest and most streamlined production of watches they can by regimenting their workers’ every task, while the workers meanwhile organize an anarchist commune. It’s a film of ironic tranquility, in which the industrial and workers’ revolutions calmly work against each other’s interests. With detached humor and compassion, Unrest beautifully portrays the origins of our current divide.

Tori and Lokita (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne). The consistent excellence of the Dardenne brothers’ work for over four decades is reconfirmed by this tense drama about two migrant kids from Benin trying to live under the radar in Belgium. For purposes of asylum they claim to be brother and sister, but they’re just friends bonded by love and trust, navigating the harrowing danger and exploitation which is the daily experience of the undocumented.

Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt) stars Michelle Williams as a sculptor at an art college whose introversion makes it incredibly difficult for her to deal with family, friends, or people in general while preparing for a show. The closest Reichardt has come to making a comedy, it’s a wry portrait of the clash between the practice of art and the demands of everyday life.

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese) dramatizes the true story of a series of murders in 1920s Oklahoma, in which the Osage Indians were targeted for wealth gained from oil being found on their land. Scorsese expands the murder story into an epic about a native community enduring the onslaught of predatory white Americans. It is classic cinema at its most elaborate.

Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda) is another gem in this director’s lifelong project telling meaningful stories of families and children. A pre-teen boy is getting in trouble at school. We experience his mother’s point of view, then a teacher’s, and finally, we follow the boy himself and learn the truth, more beautiful and heartbreaking than we imagined.

De Humani Corporus Fabrica (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel). In this immersive documentary, we observe the behavior of doctors, nurses, staff, and patients in Paris hospitals, in so intimate a way that you wonder how the filmmakers did it. In addition, we see multiple surgeries and procedures through the microscopic cameras that show the tunnel-like insides of people with the equally tiny surgical tools used to do the complicated work. A mind-blowing experience.

Great Freedom (Sebastian Meise). Under Hitler’s Germany, homosexuality was a crime. But the law didn’t change when the war ended. Franz Rogowski plays a gay man repeatedly imprisoned over decades. The story flashes back and forth in time as the main character develops an odd, touching relationship with a straight drug addict. It’s a film of devastating emotional power.

Here are some excellent B-sides:

Onoda (Arthur Harari) All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras) Asteroid City (Wes Anderson) No Bears (Jafar Panahi) The Novelist’s Film (Hong Sang-soo) Godland (Hlynur Pálmason) Pacifiction (Albert Serra) I Have Electric Dreams (Valentina Maurel) May December (Todd Haynes) Past Lives (Celine Song)

And I wish you a great movie-going 2024!

Revoir Paris is the latest film from French director Alice Winocour. I’ve seen the title translated as Paris Memories, which, for many, might sound like a romance, but it’s far from that. The subject is trauma, or more precisely, the experience of having suffered severe trauma.

Mia, played by Virginie Efira, is a young Parisian who lives with Vincent, a doctor, played by Grégoire Colin. One night, she ducks into a bistro to get out of a rainstorm. Near her is a table with a group of people celebrating a man’s birthday. She briefly exchanges glances with the man. Later, while going back to her table from the restroom, two people in front of her are shot down, the place erupts with screams, and she’s on the floor. A gunman is walking through the bistro shooting everyone in sight. Winocour does not make this scene too graphic—the shock inherent in the situation is unnerving enough.

Cut to: Mia being prepared for release from the hospital. She has a big scar on her side. Then we cut to three months later. We discover that she has gone to live with her mother in the country for that time, and now she’s back in Paris, but feeling lost emotionally. She can’t remember the shooting, and this loss of memory is accompanied by a sense of grief so acute that she can’t let go of it. We hear a brief voice-over from Vincent describing how he learned of the attack and searched frantically for Mia. He shares in the trauma experienced by others who weren’t there—the film doesn’t want to minimize that—but we soon see that this is qualitatively different than the trauma of those who were.

One day, Mia finds herself drawn irresistibly back to the bistro. She learns that a certain weekday is reserved for survivors to gather there. When she goes to this event later, she meets a young woman whose parents had been killed: they texted her a photo right before their death which just happened to show Mia in the background. But she still can’t remember anything. Then she encounters the man who had been celebrating his birthday at the next table—Thomas, played by Benoît Magimel. One of his legs has been surgically reconstructed, and he uses a crutch. He remembers everything, and his memories help Mia to begin the long process of recalling what happened to her.

The shooting is loosely based on the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, but Winocour and her co-screenwriters are not concerned with any political implications. The fact of it being a mass shooting, a very public tragedy, feeds into the film’s vivid sense of loss. There is, for instance, a large display of memorial tributes outside of the bistro.

The search for true memory seems tentative at first, but then Mia recalls the hidden meaning of her quest. Here the film ingeniously ties in the fact that many of the kitchen staff in Paris restaurants are undocumented immigrants. Those who survived the shooting fled the bistro to avoid being caught. Mia remembers one of them who helped her survive. She feels an urgent need to find him.

This is a story with characters and a plot, but the brilliant thing about it is how the director manages to make all that seem strange and ephemeral. Revoir Paris maintains, with its honesty and compassion, a persistent sense of overwhelming shock and trauma front and center throughout.

The matter-of-fact depiction of the family life of the commandant of Auschwitz conveys our horrifying capacity of living with and condoning the greatest evil.

The Zone of Interest is the name of the latest film by English writer and director Jonathan Glazer. It opens disconcertingly, with strange sounding vocal music against a blank dark gray screen. Then we meet a German-speaking family, parents and five children, in a large new house with servants and a flower garden and a small swimming pool. We soon notice that the father wears the gray uniform of a German officer, and that right next to the house is what looks like a big fortress. It’s not too long after that we learn the father’s name is Rudolf Höss, and that he is in fact the commandant of Auschwitz, in occupied Poland, the Nazis’ largest extermination center.

Höss is played by Christian Friedel, and his wife Hedwig is played by Sandra Hüller. We see the everyday life of their family, the two boys getting into scrapes, the unremarkable interactions between parents and children, or with servants or guests. In the background, however, ever present on the soundtrack, there are faint sounds coming from Auschwitz: a shout, gunshots in the distance, marching boots, an indistinct mechanical grinding, urgent voices, nothing very distinct. Well, we never see the crimes in the camp, we only hear various sounds and voices. This reliance on the ear more than the eye is part of Glazer’s disciplined approach. Not seeing things, in the broadest sense, is a key element in the lives of the family and the other Germans.

Everything normal and ordinary about this portrait of family life is cruelly shadowed by what we know. A good example is when Höss tells his wife that he is being transferred, and she gets upset because she loves her home in Auschwitz and wants to raise her kids there. What would usually be a plot point in a domestic drama hits the audience as painfully absurd. What does any of this matter under the cloud of mass killing? Of course all the adults know what’s going on. It’s normal to them, part of what they have accepted as their life. And the children might not know the whole truth, but they have more of a sense of it than they can say.

Each scene in the movie presents something more to consider about our relationship to evil. Glazer took ten years to make the film. The idea was from a novel by Martin Amis, the “zone of interest” of the title being a euphemism by which Nazi officers referred to the death camps.

The incredible sound design, by Johnnie Burn, enacts the place of our fear. At certain points, using thermal photography that makes everything look almost like a black-and-white negative, Glazer presents a mysterious girl wandering in a hellish landscape. She leaves apples near the camp fences for starving prisoners.

Jews are mentioned occasionally by family members and others the way one would mention garbage or pests to get rid of. It’s a pioneer dream, you see—the Germans finding new homes in the east, their lebensraum, their living space.
The music over the end credits, by Mica Levi (who also did the prologue) doesn’t provide a feeling of resolution as one might expect. We hear a tide of shrieking voices and synthesizers, a work of vocalized horror that will not give us rest. The Zone of Interest is not a horror film, or to put it another way, the horror is real. It’s not about somewhere else that has nothing to do with us. The stark truth must be faced if we are to live and be free.

Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin has chosen one quiet moment in history to portray the early stages of the struggle between the industrial owner class and its employees, a moment in which the development of a new idea, anarchism, came into its own. The film, based on real events, is called Unrest. Its style combines an overall feeling of order and tranquility with a tense undercurrent of resistance.

In 1877, the Russian socialist Peter Kropotkin, in exile in Switzerland, visits a town that is the center of the clock and watch making industry in the Canton of Bern. His mission, he says, is to make a map of Switzerland with the place names given by the common people rather than official landmarks. When he visits the watch factory, he is fascinated by what he finds.

The factory workers are mostly women, and this is before the assembly line approach, so each employee is in charge of making the whole watch. The bosses walk about the floor in white coats, timing all the workers to see how fast each of them can do the job, and then we hear their talk to one other about how to get the maximum production out of the labor. They’re timing everything to the last second. They even tell the employees that they have to take only a certain path to come to work, or to lunch, because that path takes the least time to walk. The film is constantly poking fun at the Swiss mania for time; there are even arguments about how to set the clocks accurately.

Genial uniformed police are a regular presence in the town. In this movie, no one raises their voice or fights. The town’s decorum seems to require that all differences must be resolved calmly. Compared to the life we know as moderns, this is remarkable simplicity. But the push to time everything is of course also a push to control, and thus it foreshadows the twentieth century and our own, when regimentation has reached unprecedented heights.

However, right under management’s nose, most of the workers in the watch factory have organized into an anarchist commune, resisting the bosses through questions and small actions, contributing funds to the community, and even donating to anarchists abroad. They discuss their strategies with seemingly perfect confidence. Anarchism, Kropotkin realizes, is really just decentralized socialism.

Schäublin and his team have fashioned a vivid, amazingly realistic version of life in a 19th century town. With an attunement to the sights and sounds of surrounding nature, the director likes to use long shots, where we see human beings in the corner of the frame, whereas solid things like trees and buildings take up the center.

If there is a main character here, it’s one of the workers, Josephine, played by Clara Gostynski. She looks with bemusement on the behavior of the factory managers, sharing sly comments with her friends working at her table. It’s no surprise when we find that she is one of the anarchists. The gentle, bookish Kropotkin makes friends with her, and she adds a nice flourish to the movie when he asks her to tell him what she does. Her long, amusing description of how to assemble a watch centers on the “Unrueh,” or in English, the “Unrest,” which is the balance wheel within the watch that makes it tick, and also gives the film its title.

Schäublin has created a microcosm, an origin story, around the issues of inequality, exploitation, and male dominance, in their simplest expression, but corresponding with astounding force to our current problems. Unrest is a real beauty, a superb cinematic achievement.

Past Lives is the debut feature from Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song. In it, she draws on our experiences of career, romance, and the balancing act between a woman’s past in Korea, and present in America. The themes really apply to anyone that has called two different countries home.

The movie begins with two 12-year-olds in South Korea, a girl and a boy, Na Young and Hae Sung, best friends who like to compete for higher marks in class. As time goes on, they develop a crush on one other. Na Young even tells her mother that she will eventually marry Hae Sung. But her father’s plans change all that—he has an opportunity which causes him to move his family to Canada for a better life.

Cut to 12 years later. A grown up Young, who has renamed herself Nora, is an aspiring playwright living in New York City, and played by Greta Lee. She seems thoroughly American now, even having occasional trouble remembering how to speak Korean. One day, out of curiosity she searches for her childhood friend Sung on the internet, and finds out that he’s a graduate student in Seoul. She contacts him and arranges for a Skype call, and that’s how they see each other once again. A sense of ease and familiarity returns quickly, and even across years of separation it’s clear that there’s an attraction. But Sung, played by Teo Yoo, has to stay in Seoul for his degree, and Nora won’t give up her playwright ambitions to return to Korea, so eventually their Skype calls get less frequent, and then they lose touch.

Now we move forward again, another 12 years. Sung, now a successful engineer, can’t get Nora out of his mind. He contacts her, lets her know he’s coming to visit, and flies to New York. A lot has changed in 12 years. Nora is married to an American writer named Arthur, played by John Magaro. A flashback shows us how they met at a writer’s retreat, and we see their comfortable supportive relationship.

So, if Celine Song were trying to write a romantic melodrama, the visit would cause a crisis in Nora’s marriage. Nope—Sung has just come to see his friend, and Nora and Arthur welcome him, and it’s all treated as it would be in real life, in other words, normal. Well, there are subtle tensions, and the two leads are excellent at evoking the tender feelings that are still there.

The beauty of Past Lives is in the touching interactions between these two people, and the recognition of how they’ve changed from the time they were children. The director is at home with a gentle editing style, following these good characters as they wander around the East Village and the Brooklyn waterfront, having conversations with a genuine hesitancy, shyness, and sincerity.

In the course of the film, Sung brings up in conversation a traditional Korean idea called In-Yun, meaning that people have connections with each other in past lives that result in whatever affinity we’re experiencing now. This becomes a thread that guides our emotional journey in the film. Past Lives celebrates the wistful, sad, joyous relationship we have with the memory of our younger selves.

Clouzot’s 1947 crime film is an apt portrait of the complex and difficult urban life in postwar France.

Quai des Orfèvres was the third film by French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, released in 1947. Clouzot is best known for two films he made in the ‘50s, The Wages of Fear, and Diabolique, classics of suspense, and in the case of Diabolique, horror as well. Quai des Orfèvres gives us an early taste of this unique master of cinema.

Marguerite, played by Suzy Delair, an aspiring music hall singer with the stage name of Jenny Lamour, flirts with everyone she can in order to get ahead, arousing the jealousy of her husband and piano accompanist Maurice, played by Bernard Blier, a sullen, morose songwriter. He reaches his limit when he discovers that Jenny has gone to the home of a lecherous old movie producer. Pistol in hand, he goes there himself, but finds the producer already dead.

Clouzot’s style was dark, and his views on society acerbic. Here we have a vivid portrait of the lower regions of society in Paris after the liberation. The fascinating, seedy world of French music halls and cabarets, in which weary city dwellers gathered in smoke-filled theaters to enjoy singing, rude comedy, and even animal acts, is the perfect setting for the furtive actions of the obsessed sad sack Maurice. It’s a tough life that Clouzot depicts, but not completely without hope—Jenny and Maurice really do love each other, after all.

The murder mystery element is, truth to tell, rather far-fetched, and Clouzot doesn’t put a lot of energy into it. It mainly serves as a device for the introduction of the film’s third major character, Inspector Antoine, played by French theatre legend Louis Jouvet. The unprepossessing Inspector, with his little mustache, bow tie, and hawk-like nose, is a relentless, cunning interrogator with a subtle wit, who says things like, “Shake my left hand; it’s closer to my heart.” We discover that he dotes on his mixed-race teenage son, his one gift from years in the Foreign Legion. Jouvet pretty much steals the picture. The film is at its best in his scenes, and in the claustrophobic police headquarters which gives the film its title, where the chaotic goings-on provide a window into Paris’s sad urban underworld.

Also in the mix is Jenny’s friend Dora (the stunning Simone Renant), a photographer specializing in erotica. In her love for Jenny she goes so far as to try to conceal evidence—it’s the love that couldn’t speak its name, of course, at least not in 1947—but  in one of the film’s most intriguing exchanges, Antoine makes the truth clear for those in the audience able to make the connection.

Quai des Orfèvres boasts shadowy, evocative black-and-white photography by Armand Thirard, and impeccable production design by the great Max Douy, whose credits included Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. I need also to mention that from Clouzot one must never expect an expansive poetic style—here as ever, ambivalence and the dark side of human nature are the primary elements in his world view. Quai des Orfèvres is an ideal introduction to his body of work.

A drama about a boy’s troubles is presented from three different points of view, and we see how judgment from appearances prevents our understanding.

For some time it’s been evident that Hirokazu Kore-eda has become one of the finest film directors, not only in Japan, but in the entire world. He may not get as much attention as others because he specializes in what we usually call domestic drama rather than any of the popular genres such as action, horror, or suspense. His movies are usually about families, relationships, and especially children. That isn’t to say that he avoids topics of social relevance. Shoplifters, for instance, in 2018, was a very sharp examination of an underclass that we commonly associate with poverty and crime. His new film is called Monster, a drama once again centering on kids, but this time almost qualifying as a mystery.

Monster has an intriguing three-part structure. We meet a single mother, played by the very engaging and expressive Ando Sakura, working hard to support herself and her only child, a pre-teen boy named Minato. One day Minato asks his mother whether someone would still be human if he’d been transplanted with the brain of a pig. She scoffs, and wonders where he could have gotten such an idea. Then he mysteriously tries to cut his own hair, and later his mom notices a scar near one of his ears. She insists on him telling her what’s wrong and eventually he reveals that he was smacked in the head by one of his teachers, a Mr. Hori. The mother goes to the school and demands answers from the principal, and that’s when things start to get really weird.

The principal, an older woman, seems completely emotionless and checked out. All she says is that the school apologizes for a mistake in its instruction. Other school officials seem just as rigid. They bring in Mr. Hori himself, who merely bows his head and apologizes. The mother naturally wants more: what actually happened and why? But the school officials won’t say more, they stay tight-lipped, and in a later meeting after the boy has been injured falling down some stairs at school, Mr. Hori blurts out that Minato has been bullying another boy. She refuses to believe it. Meanwhile, a phrase uttered by her son echoes throughout the story. “Who is the monster?” he asks.

The movie then goes back to the beginning, this time from the point of view of the teacher, Mr. Hori. From here we learn that he has been unfairly blamed by the administrators for actions that were not malicious, yet the true chain of events is still obscure. Finally, in the third part of the film, we see all the story from the point of view of the son, Minato. Now we finally discover the truth, which is completely different than anything we might have expected.

So, in form, Monster is like a mystery, but it turns out the point isn’t really what actually happened, although we do find that out. Even the question, “Who is the monster?” is significant metaphorically but not literally. The film’s real meaning has to do with the inner world of children, and how those outside of that world are prone to misjudge and misunderstand it, looking to blame or to attack when what is needed is to understand. Once the truth dawns on us, the third part of the film becomes an amazing spiritual journey that is both beautiful and heartbreaking. Monster lays bare the heart that so often we don’t notice because we were too busy.

Aki Kaurismäki has made 20 feature films in 42 years, plus about a dozen shorts, parts of anthologies, and music videos. With apologies to all the other filmmakers in Finland, he is clearly the most important Finnish director as well as the only one widely known outside of his country. His movies mostly deal with the lives of working class people, their feelings and their struggles, and his style usually displays a reserved, deadpan, almost grim sense of humor. His latest is called Fallen Leaves, and as you would expect, its theme of finding love later in life is autumnal in style and tone.

Ansa, a woman in her 40s played by Alma Pöysti, works in a Helsinki supermarket. She is quiet and lives alone with few friends, but she has a heart, and gets fired for giving expired food to a homeless person. Later she gets a job doing menial work at a recycling center. One night at a karaoke bar, she sees a man amusingly singing off-key. It’s not this man that catches her eye, but his friend, Holappa, a shy middle-aged factory worker played by Jussi Vatanen. Later he sees her again and asks her out. They go to a movie, which happens to be Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, after which she gives him her number. Unfortunately, the hapless fellow immediately loses the paper that has her number on it, and (wouldn’t you know?) even neglects to get her name. Definitely interested, he wanders around, hangs out at the karaoke bar hoping to see her again, and eventually goes back to the movie theater where they had last spoken.

This little plot device of losing contact, followed by the anxiety of trying to find her, is in line with the film’s mild sad sack form of comedy. The objective world is a constant obstacle to the fulfillment of even the characters’ most modest desires, which is part of Kaurismäki’s critical vantage point on society. The daily routines of working people; the shabby, depressing feel of the less affluent parts of a city, with its dreary buildings and streets; these are accentuated by Kaurismäki’s retro sensibility. The story takes place in 2022, but the vehicles, appliances, and other small details look more like the 1980s or ‘90s. These characters seem to have fallen behind the rest of the world, but at the same time there is the feeling of an impending threat—whenever a character turns on a radio, the news is about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this cocoon of isolation, the menace of world events still casts a shadow.

Booze is another factor in working class life that Kaurismäki has not neglected exploring in his films. In this one, Holappa secretly carries a bottle wherever he goes, and we see him fortifying himself with it when he’s under stress. He and Ansa do manage to meet up again. His drinking, however, poses a problem. Ansa has seen family members, including her father, destroyed by alcoholism, and she’s decided never to get involved with a drunk.

Throughout the picture, the dreary conditions of life for these characters, and the subdued color photography and plain set design, contrast with the soundtrack’s sentimental pop songs to create a consistently droll effect. We even get a bit of Tchaikovsky’s hyper-romantic Sixth Symphony in the mix. The effect is oddly joyful—a weird sort of affirmation. It’s as if Kaurismäki set out to make the purest Kaurismäki film, without embellishments. Fallen Leaves demonstrates his delight in the possibility of love in the midst of discouraging times.

Hayao Miyazaki, Japan’s preeminent creator of animated films, the genius behind My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, to name just a few, announced his retirement ten years ago, but thankfully the 82-year-old writer and director has changed his mind. His new movie is called The Boy and the Heron, and I admit that the title made me think it would be a wistful bucolic tale about the gentle relationship of a boy and a bird, which would be fine. But I should have known better. The realms that Miyazaki depicts, no matter how they relate thematically to real life, are always worlds of elaborate and startling fantasy.

The real life context in this picture is that of Japan in the Second World War. 12-year-old Mahito loses his mother when the Tokyo hospital she works in is bombed during the war. His father has him moved to safety in the country, living with his mother’s younger sister Natsuko, who has become his father’s new wife and is now pregnant. She is surrounded, rather mysteriously, by seven old maids who serve her. Mahito is sullen, suspicious, and resistant to his aunt’s attempts to show him love, but he is open to the eccentric old ladies. (I couldn’t help thinking of the seven dwarves from the fairy tale.)

Anyway, from the very first day, he notices the strange behavior of a local grey heron, that swoops near him, and seems to nest in a nearby abandoned tower. The old ladies tell him that the tower was built by Natsuko’s grand uncle, a wizard. Meanwhile, the heron keeps swooping near Mahito, causing him to close his window and try to keep the bird away, but eventually the heron speaks and says he can lead the boy to his mother. Thus begins an adventure that leads to other worlds hidden beneath this one.

I’ve always maintained that many children yearn for more serious stories and adventures in their animated films, not just the cute narratives with songs and wisecracking sidekicks that Disney and Pixar specialize in. The Boy and the Heron is probably too much for younger kids, but a middle school viewer might be thrilled and delighted and pleasantly scared by the surprising progression of this tale, that features a kingdom ruled by parakeets, an army of pelicans, and a host of magical and symbolic plot devices.

The animation, as you’d expect, is fabulous, a constant feast for the eyes. The story is Miyazaki’s most personal, in which he portrays for the first time a main character who is struggling with inner conflicts that he must work out and break through. Mahito’s grief at the loss of his mother is the foundation and the focal point here. The war, the real historical war, represents the old ways of power and force which Miyazaki wants children to break free of and become adults of compassion and peace. The questions of “Who am I?” are bound to the question of “Who is my true mother?” and the answers are not resolved with reasoning, but through the fantastic interplay of emotions and ideas within a child’s imagination.

Miyazaki’s playful approach to myth is a serious attempt to realize the potential of human beings to truly love and live in a state of wonder and openness. The journey is not easy or simple, but it is profoundly freeing. The Boy and the Heron treats childhood with the deep respect it deserves.

The hit man. The professional assassin. How many such people actually exist? I’m going to say they’re a microscopic percentage of the population. Yet in popular fiction and film, this character has been reborn and remade countless times: first, naturally, in the crime genre, then the action film, and there have also been a few comedy versions, hybrids, take-offs and such. It’s now an established sub-genre in the movies. And why is this? Well, instead of boring us with sociology, director David Fincher, with screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, have adapted a French graphic novel into a film called The Killer, that playfully explores the question.

Michael Fassbender plays a hit man—we never learn his name—who is preparing days ahead of time to kill a man in Paris. He’s in a tall apartment building with a room directly across the hotel room where his target will be staying. While he waits he practices yoga, listens to music (throughout the film the only music he listens to is by the rock band The Smiths), and in soft voice-over talks about his profession and the rules he observes in order to be good at what he does.

Now, I haven’t read the books, and I don’t know if the authors were playing it straight. But five minutes into the film, when the killer’s voice over thoughtfully refers to Popeye the Sailor and his statement “I am what I am,” I knew that Fincher and Walker weren’t completely serious. The killer’s earnest monologues are pretentious, sometimes startlingly silly. He also goes to great lengths to pose (to himself, we presume) as one of the best, that is the coldest and most methodical of assassins, repeating certain rules throughout the movie. “Stick to your plan,” he says. “Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.”

After this lengthy and intense build up, it’s finally time to do the job, but when he fires the shot, he misses. He then flees to his luxurious compound in the Dominican Republic, but finds his girlfriend in the hospital, savagely beaten by two people trying to get to him. The rest of the movie is about him tracking down everyone involved, and eventually the client who paid for all of this. There’s the usual violent fight to the death between the killer and one of the adversaries. This is a slick and suspenseful action film. It’s not like it’s a spoof, with jokes. But the contrast between the mechanics of the plot, and the voice-over narration and dialogue, creates a darkly satiric effect.

The ending confirmed my hunch about The Killer. Of course I won’t tell you the ending. But the metaphors here are not that hard to see. Why are hit men films made? Because they make money, and filmmaking is a business. What else is a business? Being a hit man. There’s something in the hard and implacable character of an assassin, like Jason Bourne in the Bourne series, along with a kind of invincibility endowed by his skills, that appeal to our wish fulfillment and gives us pleasure.

There is yet more depth to the satiric idea of The Killer, including the fascination with killing itself. We get to smile at the selfish presumption by which we entertain ourselves with these things. The killer is not a hero—he’s just another faceless worker.

In the late 19th century, a Danish Lutheran priest is sent to Iceland to build a church, but the overwhelming power of nature threatens to destroy his plans.

Godland is a film by the Icelandic writer and director Hlynur Pálmason. The original title in the Icelandic language indicates that the land has been corrupted in a cosmic sense—the English title Godland makes a finer point, that the God of the land, in other words nature, is radically different from the God of the church. This dramatic opposition is depicted through the experiences of a young Danish Lutheran priest in the late 19th century named Lucas, and played by Elliott Crosset Hove. Lucas is assigned by his church elder to travel to Iceland, which was still a Danish colony at the time, and build a church there for a small community on the west side of that island.

Lucas decides to land on the southeast part of Iceland and travel by horseback, with the help of some Icelandic guides, across the mountains to his destination on the western part. Along with his bible, a large crucifix for the church, and other supplies, Lucas brings a camera. His ambition is to make a photographic record of his travels in the country, and his companions. At that time, cameras were still large and unwieldy, and the process of taking photos was elaborate. This photography motif runs throughout the film as a metaphor for the detached observation practiced by the priest. Lucas acts aloof from everyone, withdrawn into his lonely religious dedication. He is further handicapped by only knowing Danish, having no familiarity with the language of Iceland. Only one of the guides knows Danish, and so he is dependent on him to communicate with the others.

The chief guide and head of the expedition is Ragnar, played by Ingvar Sigurðsson. He’s a tough old man who knows the rugged land and how to survive in it. He looks down on Lucas, the priest, with distrust and a not-so-well disguised contempt. As it turns out, Lucas has underestimated the difficulties involved in the journey. The expedition slowly plods across a barren wilderness of rocks and hills, enduring ever-increasing cold and snowfall. So long and arduous is the ordeal, that Lucas has a mental breakdown. His faith has not prepared him for this level of suffering.

The breathtaking photography in this picture conveys both the beauty and harshness of Iceland’s landscape. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another movie that so effectively recreates the long, long hours that make up such a wilderness expedition. Lucas does reach his goal, although he’s almost half dead when he arrives, and then the story concerns the rural village in which the church is built and he assumes the role of the local priest. The trouble is that the journey has changed him. His confidence has given way to fear and suspicion. The village’s head family hosts him there, and there are two daughters, the older of whom he starts to consider as a possible wife. But his instability becomes evident, and his isolation by temperament and language always works against his interest. The old guide, Ragnar, is staying there as well, and along with his difficulty in relating to the priest there is a strange desire to learn how to be religious himself, something that Lucas has lost and is unable to teach.

Godland is a film of stark forbidding beauty. We experience an overwhelming feeling of awe, too great and too terrifying for the simple young man with his simple faith to take in.

Bronson, the film from 2008 directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, is based on the life of an actual criminal named Michael Peterson, who gained a reputation as Britain’s most violent prison inmate, spending three decades in solitary confinement. During his last release on parole, he was employed as a bare-knuckle boxer, taking the name of tough-guy actor Charles Bronson. This may seem an unpromising subject for a movie, but from it Refn and his co-screenwriter Brock Norman Brock fashioned a portrait of savage unthinking rebellion, but the most important element is the man chosen to play Bronson—English actor Tom Hardy, who had made a name in theater and TV and a few supporting film roles before this part, which turned out to be his breakout into stardom.

A central device is having Bronson tell his story before a theater audience. In case there was any doubt, there are surreal touches that assure us that this is all in his imagination. Over time, his violent history has become part of a performance in his head for admirers that mostly don’t exist outside of it.

There is nothing out of the ordinary in his childhood to point to. At least Refn chooses not to try tracing Charlie’s problems to abuse of any kind, which isn’t to say that such things couldn’t have happened, but that trying to explain it in conventional terms is not the artistic point of the film. Instead we are invited to witness the horrifying and sometimes tragic inner life of an inveterate criminal without romanticizing it in any way.

It starts with the young man robbing a post office and being sentenced to seven years. What might have been four years with good behavior keeps getting extended because of the prisoner’s unwillingness to take orders from the guards. Although he’s never killed anyone, a fact that he lets us know early on, his physical attacks on others are punishing and unrestrained. Eventually he falls into a pattern of taking guards or other prison personnel hostage, then stripping naked and waiting for the billy club wielding guard units to break into his cell, where he fights them all barehanded.

So what’s this guy really like? On his last release, he shows that he wants a woman to love, but this is a feeling that is not returned. He also has no awareness of any of the rules needed in order to get by in society on even a minimal level. And eventually it turns out that he has an artistic bent, which causes a prison art teacher to overestimate his chances at rehabilitation.

In this film, however, we aren’t distracted with psychology, but always confronted with the raw presence of the man. Tom Hardy’s performance is an utter tour de force. He bulked up and transformed himself into Bronson so completely that you might forget that this is acting. And the key to the character, as Hardy embodies him, is simple, yet difficult to pull off. At Bronson’s core is an absolute refusal to recognize authority in any form, a loud and continuous NO to every attempt whatsoever to control him.

A lesser artist might have tried to make a hero out of Charlie, but we can only look on in dreadful fear at what a human being can become. The never deviating will of such a man, even to the point of self-destruction, has something stirring about it in a primitive way, something we can perhaps recognize from earliest childhood. Bronson captures the strangeness of a mind untouched by the trappings of civilized life.

It’s hard to believe that American director Todd Haynes has been making films for over 35 years now—I still think of him as a daring new voice in movies, which I guess is an indicator of my age. He was part of the burgeoning New Queer cinema, as it was called, in the 1980s and ‘90s, when openly gay filmmakers started to break into public awareness with a degree of success. Gay and gender issues have been important themes in a lot of Haynes’s movies, although not all of them.

Another is his fascination with classic film genres. Far from Heaven, from 2002, adapted some of the elements of 1950s Hollywood romantic melodrama, particularly the films of Douglas Sirk, but then added race and gay sexuality into the mix so that this old-fashioned style was depicting modern issues that no one would touch in the ‘50s. There’s a similar idea with the film Carol, from 2015, with Cate Blanchett in the title role, as a closeted lesbian, also in the ‘50s. There are other examples. But Haynes’s involvement with classic style is not just a way to make ironic connections to our current issues. It’s an orientation in itself, an interrogation, if you will, of film narrative.

Which brings me to his latest picture, May December. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, a well-known actress scheduled to star in a film about a sensational tabloid type case from twenty years earlier. A woman in her 30s was arrested for statutory rape with a 7th grader. She went to prison, had a child behind bars, and was eventually released, upon which she and the young man, named Joe, now an adult, got married. Elizabeth has asked this woman, Gracie, played by Julianne Moore, to allow her to live with her for a while, studying her before playing her in the movie. Gracie is assured that it will be a respectful treatment of the story.

From this perspective, that of an actress planning a performance, we get to know Gracie and her family, including children from a previous marriage that broke up after the scandal. And we meet Joe, who is now 36, and seemingly leads a happy life with Gracie and their kids.

The bold cinematography, camera movement, and suspense-style editing reminds me of Hitchcock, and then there’s the intense music, which practically shouts “This is a thriller!” But Haynes is actually interested in a completely different subject, and it takes some time to notice this at first. At this point I’ll just say that if you are determined to enjoy a mystery thriller or suspense film, the kind we’re generally used to, May December will disappoint you. In fact, Todd Haynes has used this genre to lead the audience astray. And why, you ask, would he do that? Because the misdirection, which is there even in the movie’s title, is an essential part of the film’s meaning.

In many stories, there are witnesses who act as point of view characters through which the narrative is told. They could be just a person for us to identify with through whatever’s happening in the story. We tend to take these kinds of characters for granted.  In this film, it’s Elizabeth, the actress played by Natalie Portman. Portman’s performance is more than incidental—it’s central. In May December, acting becomes a metaphor for how people live, an uncomfortable secret about the way we behave with one another. Crucially, as Haynes shows us, it’s usually a secret even to ourselves.

Spanish director Luis Buñuel went into exile from his native land after Franco’s military coup in 1936. He went to Hollywood and managed to scrape by translating and supervising the dubbing of Latin American films there. Eventually he found a more congenial environment in Mexico, where he made 21 films from the late 1940s through the early ‘60s. After he was allowed to return to Spain and make the film Viridiana in 1961, it shared the top award at Cannes, after which (and this is amusingly consistent with Buñuel’s work in general) it was banned in Spain for being too leftist, and condemned by the Vatican for blasphemy. Back he went to Mexico and made another film there, not of outrageous defiance this time, but from an allusive, symbolic point of view. It was his 20th Mexican film, and it marked the beginning of Buñuel’s final creative period, during which he returned to Europe and to the surrealism he had begun with as a young man. From 1962, the film is called The Exterminating Angel.

In an unnamed city, a very wealthy couple gives a large dinner party in their mansion, with about twenty aristocratic guests. After the meal, they go to the drawing room, continuing to relax and talk, while the servants all go home. It gets late, and one would think the guests should start leaving, but instead they just lie down on couches and on the floor and go to sleep. Well, the next morning it gradually dawns on them that they are, in fact, unable to leave the house. Some strange unseen power makes them afraid of opening a door and walking out. And it soon becomes evident that no one outside the house can get in either.

Days go by, and they’re running out of food and water. Everyone is grimy—they start to stink. Meanwhile we, the viewers, get to know these people in an uncomfortably intimate way. There are several different plot strands in which our highly civilized characters display their baser impulses, and suffer from a collapse of social conventions and niceties that can no longer sustain them. There is a satiric savagery in this tale, which maps out the ways that an upper class is trapped in a bubble of its own privilege. There are also thematic links to be made with the decrepitude and isolation of fascist Spain at the time.

And yet, Buñuel refused to do satire the way people expected. The Exterminating Angel doesn’t attempt to be stylish or exuberant or even comic. This humor is very dry, and the method is plain almost to the point of banality. Nor does he show contempt for his characters. They may have shallow hearts, they may be largely un-self-aware, but they’re still human beings who were children once. The misfortunes that befall the people in this movie are aimed at ourselves, the audience, as well. Nobody in the film can perceive the true situation, only their own confining points of view. The deliberate matter-of-fact quality is the way Buñuel expresses his love of cinema as the people’s art form. His style attempts to shake us awake from the fictional dream, and that can be disconcerting.

So what does the title mean, The Exterminating Angel? Buñuel got it from a poem written by a friend. The angel might be that invisible force keeping everyone from leaving the house. But what is the angel exterminating? Perhaps everything that ties us to material things, perhaps our most stubborn illusions.

Martin Scorsese has explored the darker side of humanity in many of his films. His journey into the problem of evil is darkest of all, I think, in his latest movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, based as it is on a real and very sinister conspiracy from the 1920s.

The 80-year-old Scorsese is focused on making his own kind of epics in this last phase of his career. In Killers of the Flower Moon, we have an account not only of a crime, but a symbol of a primal source of wrong on this continent—the subjugation of its native population by those of European origin.

In a deft prologue that mixes color with black-and-white period footage, we learn that the Osage Indians found oil on their Oklahoma land, which because they had retained mineral rights, enabled them to become wealthy through leasing of their land to oil developers. Some of them were able to even afford opulent houses and servants.

The main story begins with the arrival in Oklahoma of Ernest Burkhart, a World War One veteran with an air of simplicity and optimism, and a love of competition, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He’s there to work for his uncle, William King Hale, a wealthy rancher, played by Robert De Niro, who acts as a material benefactor to the Osage, and who already employs Ernest’s older brother.

But as we discover soon enough, Hale is one of a group of greedy white men that have insinuated themselves into Indian society, going so far as to get married into Osage families, but then conspiring to murder the wives and other family members so that their oil-rich land would eventually come by inheritance to the white men.

Ernest meets a young Osage woman from a wealthy local family named Molly, and played by Lily Gladstone. He becomes her chauffeur, and sure enough, they fall in love after awhile and get married. And here is a central ambiguity. Ernest genuinely likes Molly, and that like does grow into love, at least the kind of love that the intellectually limited Ernest could know. But at the same time, Hale is encouraging his nephew to marry Molly. He says he’s a great friend of her family, yet at the same time he’s not too shy to mention how profitable the marriage could be for Ernest.

Gladstone is a revelation as Molly. Her role is a kind of world in itself inside the film. Love, we discover, is for her a deeper reality than we might imagine. De Niro plays the most morally repulsive character in his career, and that’s saying a lot. He’s riveting. But Leonardo DiCaprio’s thick, slow Ernest, is the great enigma: the tragedy at the root of our inhumanity, Scorsese seems to be saying, is like a kind of sleep—the unconscious stumbling from one influence to another, one selfish act to another, that life becomes in an atmosphere of corruption.

This is classic cinema at its most elaborate. It is, however, the story of the Osage community that grounds the film. The native cast is excellent. And it’s not that Indians are more spiritual than the whites, or don’t have flaws. What we see, though, is that they’re connected, to the world and to family and to one another, whereas the white characters are trapped in a narrow and superficial version of self.

Finally, don’t let the film’s three and a half hour length prevent you from seeing it on the big screen. It’s not too often these days that you get to see a big film, in the truest sense, in a theater. Killers of the Flower Moon is a profound experience and a stark awakening from our shared American nightmare.

Film marketers and critics always try to fit a movie into a slot, a recognizable genre or type of narrative. That can be problematic. Anatomy of a Fall, the new film from French director Justine Triet, is being a called a thriller, but to take that label at face value is to distort its true quality. There are no thrills here. There is a mystery that becomes a courtroom drama, yet even that can be misleading.

Sandra Voyter, played by German actress Sandra Hüller, is a well-known author living in a cabin in the French Alps with her husband Sam, also a writer, and their 10-year-old son Daniel. We open with Sandra being interviewed in her living room by a young woman, presumably for some article, but as they talk the music playing upstairs becomes louder and louder. It’s her husband, Sandra says, who always does this when he’s doing repairs and refurnishing, which he’s doing in the attic right now. But the music gets so loud that the interview can’t go on, and Sandra apologizes, saying they can meet somewhere else at some future point.

Then we see young Daniel in sunglasses, not blind but visually impaired, wandering around the woods with his dog. Returning home eventually, with the loud music still playing, he finds his father, Sam, lying in a pool of blood on the snow in front of the house. This is the first time in the film we see Sam. Daniel screams for his mother, Sandra runs out; we then see her calling the emergency number while Daniel sobs. Cut to the emergency medical personnel putting the body into an ambulance. Sam is dead.

So how did this happen? Sandra seems mystified, and a few days later when her lawyer friend visits and asks probing questions, her account of what she was doing doesn’t explain much. A process begins in which police investigators build a case for Sandra having murdered her husband, hitting him in the head and pushing him off a balcony. The other possibility, which Sandra brings up, is suicide. And there is evidence to support that as well, the blow being caused by Sam’s head hitting a shed below the attic window before bouncing off onto the ground. These two theories make up the point of dispute between prosecution and defense in the eventual trial.

The mystery of course presents itself to the audience, but surprisingly it is not the primary emphasis of the director, Triet. Instead, these events, fraught with trauma especially for the young son, become a means to explore interesting aspects of people, and their relationships, that don’t fit into a simple pattern. Both the prosecutor and the defense try to create this pattern. The prosecutor is out to prove that Sandra was very angry at Sam, and that her behavior on the day of Sam’s death doesn’t add up. The defense argues that she is innocent of all of this, and was still committed to the marriage. But when it’s revealed that there’s a recording of an argument between the couple, and the court listens to it, we realize how variable and complex their behavior is, and in fact how this is true for us as well, for everybody going through the day-to-day events and reactions in a relationship. The truth is never pretty or simple or perfect.

Anatomy of a Fall wants to tear away the false curtain that hides and distorts our lives. It is a subtly evocative and ultimately devastating film.

When the singer Joan Baez was planning a farewell tour in 2019, after a career spanning sixty years, she gave the green light to a documentary to be made about her by three women filmmakers: Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Connor. Finally released this year, it’s called Joan Baez: I Am a Noise. I confess that I was a little taken aback by the title. Baez has one of the most beautiful voices in the world, so it’s odd to hear the word “noise” used to describe her. But as we soon discover, it’s she who wrote “I am a noise” in her journal she kept as a teenager, and she wasn’t referring to her voice, but to a startling lack of self-worth in the midst of a life with which she found it difficult to cope, even after achieving fame and success. It is this contrast between the person known to the general public, and the private Joan with her secrets and insecurities, that lie at the core of this excellent movie.

For this is not your usual biographical film about a popular artist or public figure, which in the case of a musician would include a detailed account of that person’s career and recordings, and interviews with friends and other people in the business talking about her, along with extensive concert footage. And yes, here we do get an outline of Baez’s career, enough for those not familiar with her. The only interviews are with Joan herself and older ones with her parents and two sisters. We also hear tape recordings of talks by her therapist. This film is about Joan Baez’s long inward journey of self-discovery.

She was a sensitive girl, prone to spells of anxiety and illness, who started singing as an escape from what she felt as the pressures of life. We see her debut at the first Newport Folk Festival when she was 18, and her sudden fame and popularity in the folk revival of the early 1960s. She was really young and inexperienced in the world, and public adulation couldn’t help but go to her head. Despite this, she began to feel a lack of purpose, which is when she turned her energies to the civil rights movement. She sang with Dr. King in the South, and sang at the 1963 march on Washington. She also met Bob Dylan, helped promote him to the world, sang with him, and of course they became lovers. Baez is very frank about this part of her life, and how it ended with Dylan basically dropping her, and admits that he broke her heart. Then she relates the story of her marriage to peace activist David Harris, and how good that was, until it stopped being good.

But behind all these life events, Baez takes responsibility for something in herself that couldn’t get close to anyone. The deep bond, and then the painful rivalry, between her and her sister Mimi becomes a key link in the story. Mimi had her own singing career, still always feeling like she was in the shadow of her older sister, and her life was scarred by depression and drug addiction. Talking about Mimi, Joan gains access to her own pain from childhood experiences that crippled her ability to love herself. The last part of the film is a deep dive into painful repressed memories of her parents and family.

As a teenager, I was kind of in love with Joan Baez from afar. I idealized her and thought of her as perfect. In Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, she skillfully takes apart that illusion to reveal the struggling and troubled woman she’s always been, leaving us with this exquisite gift of honesty and healing.

A Radiant Girl, the first feature written and directed by the veteran French actress Sandrine Kiberlain, opens with a montage of student actors practicing a scene from a play by Marivaux. Then we focus on one actress, 19-year-old Irène, played by Rebecca Marder, practicing that scene with a young man. Soon we can tell that she is the title character—excited by the theater and acting, intensely alive, mischievous, romantic, whip-smart, and in love with being in love.

If you were to watch the film knowing nothing about it (which most people don’t do, and if you want to do that, stop listening now), you’d see that we’re apparently in Paris, and although we don’t notice any phones or even televisions, there are zero shots of automobile traffic in the film—perhaps the budget wouldn’t allow for that, but the effect is to limit every aspect of this young woman’s life to private events and not historical ones. Until, about twenty minutes in, a comment in a brief scene reveals that we must be in German-occupied Paris during the Second World War. And the same comment also reveals that Irène and her family are Jewish.

Part of why this is so effective is that being Jewish isn’t some obvious identity marker for the family, but only a part of their overall character, which would include being French, being middle class, educated, secular (in this case), and a host of other more personal details. Irène’s theater class, her joyful obsession with boys and romance, and her behavior in her family, is not different from any non-Jewish teenage girl in essentials, although one must add that she is particularly bright, passionate, and beautiful. A Radiant Girl, as the title says, indeed.

Kiberlain has been a prominent actress since 1986, but a first directing job on a film will usually still have some rookie mistakes. For instance, here there are two or three anachronistic songs on the soundtrack, including one by Tom Waits, that however great they are as songs, took me out of the story for a bit. One big thing she got right, though, is the casting of, and directing of, the performance of  Rebecca Marder, who has such marvelous variety of expression, and can play witty and naïve and hurt and, well, radiant, to perfection.

The film doesn’t show any trains or camps. It’s about before that, and the richness and the love, and the imagining, and the everyday ups and downs of the life before. We are struck by all that was lost. By the future that was taken away. By millions of people experiencing the destruction of everything they love, an unimaginable trauma occurring in their present life, a terror shattering the mind and heart. We don’t see any of this in the film, but we know it’s coming, and the knowledge hits us in a different way when we witness the life of one girl whose hope and desire for life is reflected in the eyes of those who love her. Kiberlain introduces the hint of a uniform in the final shot, but we don’t need to see more any more. In A Radiant Girl we are left only with the memory of what was irrevocably taken from us, with a large space for grief and the knowledge of never again.

Laurence Olivier was one of the 20th century’s greatest Shakespearean actors. He also directed eight films in his career—the first three were versions of Shakespeare, and those are the ones that really made his reputation as a filmmaker. Henry the Fifth came out near the end of 1944, when Britain could feel assured of victory in the Second World War. It’s a gorgeous, rousing Technicolor marvel that of course emphasizes English courage and character in the context of a war.

Hamlet was released in 1948. Like its time, Olivier’s Hamlet is mysterious, provocative, and dark. There are many things to criticize about it, and a lot of people did and still do, perhaps partly because it had won Best Picture and Best Actor at the Oscars.

The film’s production design by Roger Furse, with its eerie stone castle of endless steps; haunted, dreamlike, suspended in clouds—is a marvel. This is a stark vision, conveyed unforgettably by Desmond Dickensen’s deep focused black & white photography. The music by William Walton is perfect. Elsinore is a spooky ethereal place with cramped rooms through which the camera moves restlessly. When the Ghost appears, we hear a deep heartbeat accompanying his distorted voice. There’s a nightmare quality to this Hamlet.

Shakespeare’s great tragedy is a work of marvelous excess which can’t help but leave an imprint on you, if you’re open to it. Hamlet himself is so bold a character, a man whose contradictions make him more rather than less believable, that there’s a temptation to go around talking like him after you’ve read the play. No wonder he’s considered the actor’s great challenge.

The problem in a film of Hamlet is always where to cut. It’s Shakespeare’s longest play, and unless you want a four-hour film (or a three-and-a-half hour film where everyone speaks the lines too fast) you must cut something. Olivier’s solution was to cut Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the false friends hired by Claudius to find out what Hamlet’s up to. I respect that decision, even though I miss the delightful wordplay in their scenes. It changes some of the meanings, but it does help the picture fit into a two-and-a-half hour running time.

Olivier has the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy done in thought rather than speech—we see Hamlet lying on the battlements, staring silently at the sky, while Olivier performs the soliloquy in voice-over. One must admire the willingness to try such things.

I love the way the camera pulls away into a long shot and then back into close-up as Claudius and Laertes plot their treachery. (Basil Sidney’s Claudius is so good that he is my image of him.) The death of Ophelia (played beautifully by 18-year-old Jean Simmons) is visualized, and this gives the Queen’s account an added poignance. The scene where the play catches the king’s conscience is quite striking (although we only get the dumb show). The look and feel of the picture is like no other—it’s hard to shake the imagery from your mind. If you’re not familiar with the play it may inspire you to become so.

Hamlet, directed by Laurence Olivier, is not the definitive version on film. I don’t think one exists yet. But it’s one that any lover of filmed Shakespeare must see.

A man tries to reach his troubled son from a previous marriage, learning his own shortcomings as a father in the process.

A couple of years ago, Florian Zeller directed a film version of a play that he co-wrote with Christopher Hampton called The Father. Anthony Hopkins won the Academy Award for Best Actor in that. Now, once again, Zeller has adapted for the screen another of his plays with the same co-author, called The Son. Despite the apparent relationship between these titles, and the fact that Hopkins shows up in one of the scenes, this is not a sequel, but a completely different story. What they share, however, is a psychological approach to drama that takes nothing for granted, causing us to question things that we may tend to assume about ourselves.

Peter, a prominent New York business executive played by Hugh Jackman, has a lovely younger wife, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and a baby boy. One day his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) shows up unannounced at Peter and Beth’s apartment. She’s in a state of panic about their teenage son Nicholas. Nicholas has not been going to school—she’s learned that he’s been leaving in the morning, but only pretending to go. When questioned about this, he refuses to talk, and worse than that, he’s behaving in disturbing ways. Can Peter please talk to him and find out what’s wrong?

So Peter visits Kate’s house after work the next day. Nicholas (played by a fine young actor named Zen McGrath) is a diminutive, fearful, hyper-alert 15-year-old. When asked why he won’t go to school, he keeps saying “I don’t know.” The best he can explain is that he just can’t deal with life. Then he surprises Peter by asking if he can come to live with him. Of course the father feels responsibility and concern for his first son, and later asks Beth if it would be OK if he moved in. She has misgivings. But recognizing how important it is to her husband, she agrees to it.

What we find is that moving in with Dad doesn’t make Nicholas happy. He tries to do better, but the same patterns emerge. What we have here is a realistic kind of mystery, where various solutions are discussed, but we can’t easily get at the core of the problem. Nicholas does express some anger about his parents’ divorce, and about his father leaving him to make a new family. Also, Peter seems addicted to work; Beth keeps complaining that he’s always working. Rationally we might conclude that Nicholas’s father wasn’t there for him enough, and that the divorce rocked hiss world in a way his parents can’t fully appreciate, and it would seem that these are true in a way. But frustratingly, Peter still finds himself unable to connect to his son’s heart, instead wasting time and energy in attempts to manage the situation.

There’s no clear answer, but we get a clue when Peter visits his own father, played by Anthony Hopkins. It’s not merely that this man was never there for him. It’s that he can’t even see him as a person. His attitude is that Peter needs to get over it and stop blaming him for his problems. Now, Peter knows that his way of talking with his son is not as bad as this, but still carries a sense of judgment, a focus on doing instead of just who Nicholas is.

Hugh Jackman excels in the lead role because behind his competence we can see his vulnerability. The Son is a haunting experience because it doesn’t offer simple answers to the painful questions we’re forced to ask ourselves when our children or other loved ones are suffering. The wound is left open so that we can really feel it.

I’ve had occasion before to praise the work of Korean writer and director Hong San-soo. He’s unusual in that he’s artistically modest (always doing small scale films about ordinary life) yet incredibly prolific (31 features in the last 27 years, including 15 in the last 10, and a few shorter films). Rather than trying to get financed by the big companies, he proposes an idea for a film to friends in the movie industry who can help fun modestly budgeted films. Over the years, he’s stopped writing screenplays, and instead works from little scraps of story and dialogue that then expand as he shoots, with the help of some improvisation from his actors. One of his recent films from last year (amazingly, he’s released three since then) is called The Novelist’s Film, and it’s arguably his most self-referential, in that it cleverly hints at his own creative process through its minimalist story.

Lee Hye-yeong plays Junhee, a moderately successful novelist who travels outside of Seoul to visit, unannounced, an old friend that runs a bookstore. Her friend is surprised and happy to see her, but at the same time we can sense some underlying tension. Junhee sought her fortune in the big city while her friend let go of her writing ambitions to sell books and stay within the comfort of a smaller circle. The author tends to be rather blunt; at one point she comments that her friend has gained weight since she last saw her. Later her friend says that she hasn’t read Junhee’s latest novel because now she only chooses books that she wants to read rather than those she’s supposed to read. This seems funny in recollection, but in the moment it plays as plain and matter-of-fact, like everything else in the movie.

Hong has made a film composed almost entirely of small talk, and in high contrast black & white to make things seem as mundane as possible. At all times he refrains from what we might think of as “drama,” and for some viewers this might take some getting used to.

Junhee later runs into a movie director she has known, and they gather with several friends at a restaurant where the director gets a little drunk. Everyone keeps telling Junhee that she’s “charismatic,” and to tell the truth, she is. Korean audiences will be familiar with the lead, Lee Hye-yeong, as a long-time popular actress and singer, which I suppose reinforces the impression of charisma.

Junhee, it turns out, is disillusioned with her writing and feels blocked. They happen to run into a well-know young actress, who is a fan of the author’s novels. Junhee, who has never directed a film, suddenly gets the idea of making a short film using this actress. The actress eventually agrees, and when we finally get to see this film at the end of the picture, it’s quietly revelatory, slyly illustrating Hong’s own ideas about film and narrative through this novelist’s manner and personality reflected in her film style. The Novelist’s Film is remarkable both as a kind of poem of everyday behavior and a peek into the quirky sensibility of a true artist.

On a totally different note, you should know that Jonathan Demme’s concert film about The Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense, is being released in theaters for its 40th anniversary. It’s an amazing performance in which almost all the songs, in my opinion, sound better than the versions from their studio albums. Demme perfectly fused his visual skill with the flamboyant style of The Talking Heads in this film. Be sure to catch Stop Making Sense on the big screen if you can.

You Hurt My Feelings is the satirically petulant sounding title of the latest comedy by writer-director Nicole Holofcener. Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as a writer and teacher in New York City named Beth. She’s married to Don, a therapist played by Tobias Menzies. We get to know them as we might in life, in their work and home life, and relationships to family and friends, with the result, which Holofcener has a talent in her films for getting, that You Hurt My Feelings feels “lived in,” with dialogue that is remarkably funny without sounding too scripted.

Beth is trying to get her novel published, her second book after debuting a few years earlier with a mildly successful memoir about her abusive childhood. She’s terribly insecure about this new book, worrying and fretting about it out loud, and Don always reassures her that she’s fine and the book is good. We get to see Don interacting with patients as a therapist, and some of these are hilarious—in particular, Amber Tamblyn and David Cross as a constantly bickering couple. Don’s therapeutic approach is mild-mannered, which doesn’t always seem adequate when dealing with the eccentricities of his clients. He has self-doubts, too.

They have a 26-year-old son, Eliot, currently working at a pot store, and his mother nags him about this, saying he could do better. In the meantime, he says he’s writing a play, but won’t show it to anyone. Beth has a sister, Sarah, an interior decorator played by the excellent Michaela Watkins, married to a struggling actor, and when the sisters visit their Mom, played by the great Jeannie Berlin, the scenes really sparkle.

So, you might ask, what happens? Before I say, I need to point out that Holofcener’s writing is so natural and amusing that you’re not really thinking about what will happen while watching. She has a specific point of view, warm and insightfully comic, about life, and therein lies the simple pleasure of watching a Holofcener film.

Anyway, Beth and her sister drop in at a store they know their spouses will be in, and Beth accidentally hears her husband, Don, tell her brother-in-law that he doesn’t really think Beth’s novel is very good, and gets irritated by her constant talking and worrying about it. Beth and Sarah leave without letting their husbands know they were there, and Beth then freaks out. How could Don have lied to her all this time, telling her the book was good?

As the film goes on, it’s delightfully apparent that this is not an arbitrary plot thread like you get in situation comedies. It becomes a theme: the things we say to loved ones in order to please them, affirm and support them, that don’t always reflect what we really think or feel. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who excelled in situation comedies on TV, has a deeper well of talent that is clearly expressed in her film work. The way she shows her character trying to deal with the warring emotions of betrayal and love of her husband is finely tuned, managing to be both funny and sympathetic. Menzies is well-matched with her—laid back where she’s intense. Holofcener is careful to show the natural wrinkles in the faces of the characters. These are middle-aged people with a lot of history, and the challenges of aging are a part of the comedy without the movie having to emphasize it very much.

Is there anyone in Hollywood, besides Nicole Holofcener, making these kind of smart, grown-up comedies of imperfection? I’m not sure. You Hurt My Feelings is another example of how to do it right.

Here’s an Oscar trivia question. What was the first non-English language film to be nominated for Best Picture? The answer is Grand Illusion, a French film, in 1938. It was the first, and there wasn’t another for the next 31 years. Americans didn’t pay much attention to foreign language films then. But this one got through, with great acclaim, although of course it didn’t win the Oscar.

Jean Renoir, son of the eminent impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, emerged in the 1930s as one of France’s most important filmmakers. He liked to use long takes and a moving camera. He said, “Everyone has their reasons,” and thus he never did hero-villain movies, instead perfecting a kind of empathetic realism.

This movie is set during the First World War, the Great War as it was known at the time. An aristocratic French pilot, Captain de Boëldieu, played by Pierre Fresnais, and his working class lieutenant Maréchal, played by Jean Gabin, are shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans. Boëldieu meets the pilot who shot him down, von Rauffenstein, played by American actor and revered silent film director Erich von Stroheim. They discover that they have mutual friends and interests. This is the beginning of a central theme: the wide barriers between classes in both countries, illustrated by how two upper class officers on opposite sides can relate better to one another than to their own men.

Boëldieu and Maréchal are then taken to a POW camp where they meet a lot of spirited French prisoners, including the kind and generous Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), a Jewish man from a wealthy family who shares his food bundles with everyone. Here Renoir, and his co-screenwriter Charles Spaak, present another challenge—Jews were generally not well accepted in Gentile society then.

At one point, the prisoners put on a variety show that is a highlight of the film. It includes dancing in drag while lip-synching to a recording of an operetta. Suddenly Maréchal bursts on stage announcing a recent French victoryin battle, and all the POWs stand up and sing the national anthem, La Marseillaise, defiantly to the German soldiers. A few years later, Hollywood took this idea and adapted it for a similar effect in the film Casablanca.

Eventually some of the troublesome French POWs are transferred to a mountain fortress that happens to be run by Rauffenstein, who was wounded and reassigned to this post. He renews his friendship with Captain de Boëldieu, and in their conversations we discover a difference in attitude. Rauffenstein wants the old world of privilege preserved. Boëldieu, however, has accepted society’s changes and wants to be of service to the common people. The “grand illusion” of the title is this old pre-war reality, when everyone stayed in their place in service to nobility. World War I destroyed that forever, and Renoir’s film is both an elegy for the past and a hopeful vision of the future.

There’s quite a bit more to the story. The French plan a daring escape, and Grand Illusion is, in fact, the first POW escape film. But the movie is not primarily action—it’s a film of deep emotion and growing insight, with Jean Gabin, France’s biggest movie star, embodying the spirit of a new, more democratic world. Alas, the second World War dashed this spirit for awhile. Renoir had to flee to America, while the Germans banned his movie and tried to destroy all the prints. They failed. Grand Illusion remains one of the greatest antiwar statements ever filmed.

How far will a mother go to protect her daughter? Lingui, a film by writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, poses this question against a broader canvas of women’s struggles in the African country of Chad.

We first meet Amina, a single mother scratching out a living near the outskirts of Chad’s capital city, N’Djamena, as she cuts up steel belted tires, extracts the steel belts and fabric cords, and uses them to make little stoves that she sells at the market. The film eases us into her daily life, her friendship with another woman seller, and her devout practice of Muslim prayer, done outside of a mosque because women can’t pray with the men.

We first see her teenage daughter in the midst of a crisis—Maria won’t talk to her mother about what’s wrong, and pushes her away, saying “Don’t touch me.” Eventually Amina discovers that her daughter has been expelled from school for being pregnant. In anger, she slaps Maria’s face and bemoans the shame that she has put on them. Her daughter is defiant, and insists that she wants an abortion. But that’s not possible, Amina, says. We are Muslims, and it’s not allowed.

Amina, we can sense, is at heart a gentle person, not the strict mother she tries to be. It turns out that she had Maria out of wedlock herself, and as a result was rejected by her family, and lives under a cloud of rumor and suspicion in her neighborhood for being unmarried. She’s been through a lot, and the wonderful performance by a non-professional actress, Achouackh Abakar Souleymane, brings out more than few unexpected aspects of her character. One of the film’s crucial moments communicates an inner realization on Amina’s part, a changing of her mind, a decision to help her daughter get that abortion, all just from the changing expression on her face, no words. It’s a superb piece of acting and direction. Amina’s commitment to her daughter is also a change in her relationship to herself. She no longer cares what the local imam, who pesters her about not attending mosque enough, says to her. She no longer lets other people, and especially men, determine who she is and how she should act.

Haroun presents a portrait of the plight of women in Chad—treated as property by their husbands, ordered to cover their bodies and their hair according to religious teaching, and forced to submit to so-called female circumcision as girls. One of the plot threads tells of Amina helping her sister get around by subterfuge her husband’s demand to have their young daughter mutilated this way. Haroun is a progressive filmmaker who is not afraid to criticize the male dominant culture in his country.

The dialogue is almost entirely in French, France being Chad’s former colonizer, and French the official language. But the title, Lingui, we casually find out, is a word in the Chadian Arabic dialect, meaning “sacred bonds.” In fact, the film is being promoted in English as Lingui, the Sacred Bonds. Amina realizes that her bond with her own daughter is greater than any demands her society might make on her. Lingui, the film, tells us that real love in a family and the love between women and their children, are sacred bonds at the center of human life.

Kelly Reichardt has been making movies for thirty years, and has gained steady critical acclaim. Most of her feature films take place in Oregon and tell stories of rural working people, and those on the margins of society—misfits. She refuses to romanticize people by making their ordinary lives fit into some dramatic arc. The result is a cinema of small details, a portrayal of human thoughts, emotions, and desires that make up the texture and meaning of her work. Her latest film is called Showing Up.

Michelle Williams plays a sculptor named Lizzy who works at an Oregon art college. This is Williams’ fourth film with Reichardt; you can tell she has a great affinity with this director, and here she gets to play a different type of person than usual for her. Lizzy makes clay sculptures, about two feet in height, of women in various dynamic poses, ranging from painful to joyous. She has a show coming up, and while preparing for this, her relationships and encounters with artists, friends, family, and others, find her frequently grouchy and impatient. She spars with an artist friend living next door named Jo, played by Hong Chau, who also happens to be her landlady. Jo’s also planning a show, and seems too busy to deal with the fact that there’s been no hot water for days in Lizzy’s apartment.

The key to the film, for me, lies in the scenes with Lizzy working on her sculptures. Williams conveys the intense inwardness of the artist, absorbed and focused on the work, tending to shut everything else out, and how this deeply introverted habit of mind persists in her everyday interactions with others. She’s a dour truth-teller, impatient with other people’s casual avoidance of honesty or responsibility. She works as an assistant to her mother, an administrator at the college, and this is a strain. When she visits her father, long divorced, and played by Judd Hirsch, she’s alarmed that a couple of aging hippies have befriended him and are basically living on the couch, while he acts oblivious to being taken advantage of. And a visit to her adult brother makes clear that his mental illness, including paranoia, has only gotten worse.

As always in a Reichardt film, the problems of human beings are real and sometimes severe. But in Showing Up, she’s come closest to making an actual comedy than ever before. Behind the problems there’s a gentle sense of humor, a rueful awareness of just how strange things really are.

Once again, it’s the little things. For instance Lizzy sees that her cat has brought a pigeon into the house. She takes the bird, still alive, and throws it out the window. The next day her neighbor, Jo, says she found a pigeon with a broken wing in her yard, and asks Lizzy to help her. They wrap the wing and put the bird in a box with food and water, and then Jo asks Lizzy to take care of it for awhile. This is just the beginning of an entire storyline about this pigeon, and it’s a low-key hilarious way of portraying the neurotic mind of a remarkable artist.

Williams is adept at finding ever new inflections in the role of Lizzy. Hers is a profoundly intimate and unglamorous performance, maybe her best. Showing Up makes me smile at the predicament of all seekers who straddle the worlds of art and practical life. It’s a pitch perfect film.

The title gives us the essence of the story. Beau, a disheveled middle-aged man with a wide-eyed stare, played by Joaquin Phoenix, lives alone in a small apartment. He is afraid of everything all the time. We, the audience, are totally confined to Beau’s point of view. What he hears, for instance, of other people outside his apartment, is a stream of muttering, crying, screaming, moaning, and arguing, punctuated with occasional gunshots. It doesn’t take long to figure out that what Beau perceives is not necessarily real—in fact, as the film goes on, we stop being able to distinguish if anything is objectively real—our suspicion that he sees and hears things that aren’t there, plus the fact that everyone seems to be plotting against him, indicates that he might be paranoid schizophrenic, yet there’s no hint of such a diagnosis in the movie.

Beau is planning to travel soon to visit his mother, on the anniversary of his father’s death (which right away tells us something is off). He packs a bag, he has plane tickets, but as he’s about to leave he goes back into the apartment because he’s forgotten something, only to find when he starts to leave again that his suitcase is missing along with the keys to his apartment. He has to call his mother to explain, and the conversation is a perfect encapsulation of guilt and anxiety. Thus begins a darkly surreal journey into the depths of madness.

Horror movies use fear as a stimulant. The audience gets pleasure from being scared, then gets a little relief, then more scares. It’s how horror films entertain us. Ari Aster seems to be saying: What if all you felt was fear? What if fear was the underlying condition of all your experience?

Joaquin Phoenix, in a performance of intense discipline, embodies a character who can only be a victim, who has no defense against any and all attacks of malice, misfortune, and abuse. The one word he says more than any other is “What?” He cannot comprehend the disastrous series of events that fill his mind. He is deceived, stabbed, hit by a speeding car. He witnesses murders and a suicide. At the center of all this is an emotionally incestuous bond with his mother, a prominent businesswoman who berates him without mercy for his failures.

The more bizarre things happen, the more we guess that he is creating his own suffering without realizing it, a mental trauma that persists because that’s all he knows. We must guess all this—nothing is spelled out.

A horror film usually wraps things up dramatically in a certain time. Aster says no, I don’t want just entertainment—instead, he’s made his movie three hours long, and I think we’re meant to feel exhausted and spiritually crushed, just like the beleaguered main character. Beau Is Afraid is a difficult film. It has bursts of maniacal humor that only emphasize the bleakness of the living nightmare. It’s a messy masterwork.

American director Ira Sachs makes films that explore relationships—of all kinds, although he’s well known as an important figure in gay cinema since the late 1990s. His latest picture is called Passages, and I think it’s his most remarkable yet. The word “passages” is a way to describe the life of relationships, their lows and heights, the often complicated journey of feelings involved.

We meet a young man in the midst of directing a film. His demands on the actors and crew are forcefully, that is to say harshly, expressed. This is Tomas, played by Franz Rogowski, a driven personality, extraordinarily free in his manner, a gay German in Paris, married to Martin, a brilliant young Englishman played by Ben Whishaw. We learn all this somewhat randomly in the first twenty minutes or so, but the film starts right off with Tomas encountering a young French woman named Agathe, and played by Adèle Exarchopoulos. They go to bed that same night. Later, Tomas tells Martin about it, saying it was a new kind of exciting experience for him. He expects his husband to just accept this, but of course Martin will have trouble with it.

So in the abstract, the situation is of a gay man turning towards being straight, and then maybe wanting to be both at the same time. But Sachs’s film is anything but abstract. Co-written with Mauricio Zacharias and Arlette Langmann, Passages is resolutely focused on human beings and their real desires and faults, not on stereotypes.

At the center is a mesmerizing performance by Rogowski as Tomas—he’s risen to be one of the best actors in cinema in recent years. We first see Tomas’s self-centeredness, but then Rogowski shows us many other aspects: he has a kind of gentle assertiveness and honesty; we can understand why he seems attractive to his two lovers; the film never tells us to hate him; the serious problems that he exhibits simply become more evident, as they would in real life with someone we know that has such issues. We could call him a sex and romance addict, but the character is too complex to be dismissed so simply. Both of his partners endure a kind of roller coaster ride, ecstatic but also tragic and hurtful.

Key to the filmmakers’ notions about the characters is that sex is good and desirable and important. I think it’s weird that this point of view could be controversial at all, but there you are. There’s lots of explicit sex in the movie, and the director chooses to make it as realistic and lengthy as he can. This is a major reason that Tomas, Martin, and Agathe are involved with each other, and Sachs makes us experience and feel this viscerally. At the same time we know, or suspect, that emotional intimacy is always just out of reach for Tomas, who seems to desire whichever partner is not currently in his life.

By the way, there are conversations that are in French—not too many, but we are in Paris, after all. Sachs makes an interesting stylistic choice here: no subtitles. I don’t know French, so at first I was annoyed. Then I was won over by the idea. Just as in real life, I listen to languages I don’t understand, and there are no subtitles to help. In any case, if you pay attention you can understand the gist of the scenes.

Passages is a brilliant, dark, fascinating fever dream—starring: the wounded narcissist in all of us.

The gangster movie has been a durable genre, along with the western, one of the uniquely American film types. There had been such films in the silent era, but the early 1930s was when they suddenly took off. Three Hollywood films in particular, all made within roughly the same year, were the origin points for just about everything that came after, a kind of unholy trinity of crime pictures.

The first one was Little Caesar, released by Warner Brothers in 1931, directed by Mervyn Leroy, and starring Edward G. Robinson as Rico Bandelli, a Chicago mob boss based loosely on Al Capone. Robinson’s performance made him a star, and endless comedians since have parodied the character’s mannerisms, with “Myeah myeah! I’m the boss. See?” and so forth. Robinson’s work in the film is much more subtle than this caricature—revealing Rico’s brutality, suspiciousness, and animalistic enjoyment of power. The Warners were cutting costs by cutting their movies for speed, which encouraged economy of means and expression. LeRoy excelled at this. In one great sequence, a couple pairs of legs walk swiftly into a room, we hear shots, a body falling, and then a glimpse of the killers’ hats as they turn and flee. All in mere seconds. The movie was a box office hit, despite the usual concerns of the moral crusaders always looking askance at Hollywood.

The second picture, released later the same year, was called The Public Enemy, also at Warners, which in the ‘30s was the one studio focused more on urban working class stories more than fantasies about rich people. William Wellman, a veteran with a reputation for risk-taking, was the director. His intuition for talent helped him here: James Cagney was cast as the main character’s sidekick, but after seeing him work, Wellman switched the two actors, putting Cagney in the lead as Tom Powers, a tough Irish mobster from Chicago. His performance is stunning, full of wild scary energy, speedy wisecracking, and jaunty belligerence. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes when Powers, in the pouring rain, gets ready to enter a gathering of enemies with guns blazing. It’s absolutely chilling. The expert editing and sound make this film stand out as one of the true greats.

The third movie, released early in 1932, was Scarface, made by Howard Hawks for a small outfit run by millionaire Howard Hughes. It starred the famous and well-regarded actor Paul Muni as Tony Camonte, yet another Chicago gangster (honestly, there were other cities that had gangs) inspired by Al Capone. Of the three films, this one’s the most violent. Tony is a barely literate homicidal monster who tears relentlessly through gangland with machine guns, and to top that, has an unacknowledged romantic obsession with his own sister. The picture is also pretty funny—Hawks highlighting all the most exaggerated criminal fantasies and revenge scenarios he could come up with. The guardians of virtue attacked this film in particular as glorifying criminals, and Hawks was forced to put a little prologue before the story, telling the audience that crime doesn’t pay. Incidentally, there’s no point comparing this to the Al Pacino film from the ‘80s. The only thing really similar is the title.

The unholy gangster film trinity: Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface, all released in 1931 and ’32, are available on streaming platforms and on DVD and Blu-ray.

There are some movies that it’s hard to say much of anything about, because, well, reviews aren’t supposed to have “spoilers.” In this case, however, most people outside of Iran will struggle with understanding the film without some background. This I need to mention: the fact that the background explains the theme is too bad—but to make up for that, I won’t reveal the particular ways that the theme occurs as action.

The background is that the government of Iran, after the 1979 revolution, executed many thousands of dissidents, leftists, secularists, and anyone else deemed an enemy of the Islamic Republic. This continued through the 1990s, when writers and intellectuals were targeted for elimination. Furthermore, the government would order other prisoners, soldiers, even family members, to participate in these executions, by kicking the stool away from people to be hanged. The four stories in There is No Evil each concern people who, at some time or another, in some form, were ordered to carry out executions.

The wildly intense second story is about an inmate in a soldier’s prison who is told that if he executes a prisoner, his sentence will be significantly shortened. The third story follows a young soldier on leave who visits his fiancée and her family in the country, then discovers to his dismay that she is mourning a man who had stayed with them, and had recently died. No, she insists, it was not romantic—he was an activist and mentor whom she admired. The final story shows us a married couple in a remote part of the country who are visited by their niece, a medical student, on the suggestion of her father. Her aunt and uncle are small farmers, and while the uncle shows her around, and talks about things like how a fox ate all their chickens, she wonders why this man, a skilled doctor, gave up his practice to do this.

Each story is unique. Each shows a different segment of Iran and society. And the effect of the theme is noticeably different in each, but in essence the moral emergency is the same. Can you look yourself in the mirror after executing a human being?

Rasoulof has gotten negative attention before. He had this film shot in secret (amazing when you look at the beauty of the visuals here) and then smuggled out of Iran. It promptly won the Golden Bear, the top prize at Berlin. It was then banned in Iran, of course, and the government put Rasoulof in prison. This is the price of a truthful film in today’s Iran.

The title, There Is No Evil, by the way, is ironic. We have a habit of looking at evil as if it were somebody else.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American physicist who was assigned to be the head of the Manhattan Project, a team of scientists tasked with developing an atomic bomb during World War II. Once American intelligence knew that German scientists were working on creating such a bomb, it was a race against time for the United States to get there first, given the existential threat posed by Hitler. In 1945, when Germany was defeated, the project continued, and a bomb was successfully detonated in New Mexico. It was used to destroy two Japanese cities that year, ending the Pacific war.

It’s an extremely complex historical subject, as was Oppenheimer’s life, character, and career. To make a good dramatic film out of it would be a daunting prospect. But British director Christopher Nolan is accustomed to being challenged. He likes to do big movies: big budgets, big stories, on big wide screens. And with film, not digital. Fascinated by this “father of the atomic bomb,” he presents us now with his latest epic, Oppenheimer, something different from what he’s done before, a film about important issues and ideas in recent American history.

Cillian Murphy, in the role of a lifetime, plays Robert Oppenheimer, with his fedora and his pipe: a brooding and enigmatic character, a man of contradictions. Nolan, in a gutsy move, uses as his narrative framing device, two hearings: one in the 1940s, after the war, in which Oppenheimer and other witnesses are cross-examined by a military intelligence panel determined to take away Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and a Senate hearing from the 1950s, in black and white, interrogating the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey, Jr., about his relationship with Oppenheimer. I call it gutsy because in what is marketed as a blockbuster, there is a lot of talk in these hearings, a lot of debate, all taken from the actual transcripts, and Nolan respects the audience enough to let them absorb a lot of information in the course of the film.

The flashbacks emerge from the hearings: Oppenheimer at Harvard, and later studying in Germany. His interest in progressive causes in the ‘30s, his donating to help the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. His encounter with Communists during this period, although he never joined the party. And then the center of the narrative: the Manhattan Project itself, with Matt Damon as General Groves, the military supervisor of the effort, and featuring a lot of other significant characters, such as Neils Bohr and Edward Teller. The climax, the detonation at Los Alamos, is stunning.

Oppenheimer had doubts about the morality of using the bomb that haunted him throughout his life. The story Nolan tells is of a scientist who devoted himself to helping his country defeat the most evil regime ever known—Nazi Germany—sacrificing his time, his career, and even his personal judgment for this greater good. But the American establishment, freaked out after the war about the Soviet threat, turned on him and used his past association with Communists to destroy him. Oppenheimer himself is conflicted—we see him making an awkward, bellicose speech after Hiroshima, to please a crowd—but we also see him sharing his feeling of guilt with President Truman (Gary Oldman), who dismisses him with contempt. Despite some missteps, I think this admission of inner uncertainty is what makes Oppenheimer a moving experience. America is still conflicted, and the film isn’t afraid to show this.

Wes Anderson has a consistent style. It’s impossible to mistake it for someone else’s. But that doesn’t mean all his films are the same, or are based on the same idea. And in the case of his latest picture, Asteroid City, I think we’re seeing something conceptually different from anything he’s done before.

We begin in black-and-white, with a pompous host (Bryan Cranston) telling us about a great play being written by a great American author, Conrad Earp, played by Edward Norton. It’s a play, but the black-and-white aesthetic seems to place it in the realm of live TV in the 1950s, when interesting original drama by new writers and directors was regularly aired on the still-young television networks. This particular play is set in 1955, in a small tourist attraction in the middle of nowhere, with desert as far as the eye can see, called Asteroid City. An asteroid fell there some time ago, and this clump of buildings (you could hardly call it a town, much less a city) has built up around it. And the camera helps us out at one point by doing a complete 360 so we can see it all.

Jason Schwartzman plays Augie Steenbeck, who is taking his kids to see their grandfather when the car breaks down in Asteroid City. He’s put off telling them that their mother has just died, and is forced to do so now in the most awkward way possible, showing them the Tupperware containing her ashes. It so happens that there is a junior astronomy fair and contest scheduled for that weekend in Asteroid City, and Augie’s gifted son Woodrow is interested in participating. Here is the occasion for the entrance of a whole bunch of characters connected with the event, including a moody, enigmatic woman played by Scarlet Johansson, who forges an ambiguous bond with Schwartzman’s character. There are characters played by Tom Hanks, Liev Schreiber, Steve Carrell, and many others. The junior astronomy event itself is interrupted by an alien emerging from a descending space ship, in a neat evocation of 1950s science fiction.

So here I’ve described what sounds like a plot. But watching the film, it becomes evident that the story is actually very abstract, extremely loose-fitting, like a game where you play with certain elements in different ways, just for the fun. Anderson has pulled the narrative thread out, and left us with an amusing and intriguing series of symbols of American beliefs and illusions. And then from time to time we return to the framing device in black-and-white, by which we are reminded that this is just fiction. Anderson’s subject is fiction itself, the act of playing with fictional characters doing fictional things. Here he celebrates the delight, puzzlement, and essential artificiality of the whole enterprise.

What cracks me up, I have to admit, is that because of Wes Anderson’s unique, well-known style, and his ability to load his films with lots of famous actors, he’s managed to launch what is basically an avant-garde art film into the cinematic mainstream, while laughing at his own audacity. Late in the film, a few of the actors start complaining that they don’t understand the play. Anderson might be trying to speak for the audience here. The odd and insistent phrase (and song) “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” is as straightforward as Anderson will ever get. For artists to create, they need to first turn off their conventional ideas of reality. Or so it seems to me, but I do believe I need to watch Asteroid City again.

Religious stories go wrong in the movies so often, it’s enough to scare a filmmaker off the subject altogether. But one happy exception is The Nun’s Story from 1959, adapted from a best-seller by Kathryn Hulme, and directed by Fred Zinnemann. Audrey Hepburn plays Gabrielle, the daughter of a famous French surgeon, who becomes a nun in the 1930s and works as a surgeon’s assistant in the Congo. Hollywood has always presented such a wishy-washy image of Catholicism and nuns—see The Bells of St. Mary’s, for example—that the seriousness and craft of this film caught me by surprise.

The first third of the movie, which takes place in a convent, is especially good. The film patiently follows Gabrielle through each phase of her initiation into convent life. The pace is unhurried, the treatment is even-handed, and the effect is fascinating. Instead of the usual sugary sentimental music, the picture has a moody, and at times even ominous, score by Franz Waxman that reflects the real inner conflicts that would occur in the heart of someone attempting to devote herself to the rigors of a religious life.

It seems to me that this is the best work Audrey Hepburn ever did on screen. For once she is not an object of romance, but a complex character striving for meaning in her own life. She performs marvels in portraying a life that goes through quite a few different phases of growth and varying beliefs.

The Congo sequences don’t have quite the compelling interest of the earlier scenes in the convent. However, a very young Peter Finch is on hand as a rakish, unbelieving surgeon. How refreshing that his growing regard for Sister Luke (played by Hepburn) is only on the level of friendship—and no one tries to convert him, either. In fact, the film’s attitude towards belief is on the whole rather interesting in that it never becomes dogmatic on either side, only caring to present the nun’s inner struggle clearly.

This was a big studio production, by one of the most highly regarded directors in the industry—Zinnemann was of course the man who had made High Noon and From Here to Eternity. The Nun’s Story was critically acclaimed, although it got swept by Ben-Hur at the Oscars that year, and it did well at the box office. But for some reason, it’s not that well known any more. I know of few films that so beautifully depict someone’s inward progress as a person, without being at all dull. And the ending, the final scene, is one of the masterpieces of cinema, perfectly restrained, without any music, and emotionally stunning. One can only say, “Bravo.”

The Nun’s Story is available on DVD.

The Cathedral, the remarkable sophomore feature by Ricky D’Ambrose, is a subtle drama of an average-seeming extended middle class New Jersey family from the 1980s through the early 2000s. The central couple is Richard Damrosch, who owns a printing business, and his beautiful wife Lydia. They get married in the ‘80s, and have a son together, Jesse.

We watch certain scenes, some of key events like the wedding, others banal and everyday, and the only backstory we get is provided by an occasional female voice-over, drily explaining the basic situations and relationships. Lydia’s father does not like Richard. Richard’s parents are distant. There’s a grandmother that gets resentfully shuffled around between different adult children. Lydia’s mother and aunt are hostile and end up not speaking to each other for years. In the beginning I said that this is an average-seeming family, and that’s one of the film’s brilliant achievements, to take a so-called “normal” family and reveal, without drama, the bleak dysfunction at its core.

Most striking in this respect is the father, Richard, played with alarming assurance by Brian d’Arcy James. Richard, we discover, is a narcissist filled with resentment and self-pity, compelled to make scenes that ruin even the most benign family gatherings. He and Lydia divorce after a few years. They both get remarried. Still, the emotional chaos continues, swirling around the life of their quiet, withdrawn son Jesse, played by four different young actors from the ages of 3 to 18. And here is another key to the movie’s unusual style and effect.

We don’t see or hear very much of Jesse, even when he gets older and more vocal. And yet the entire film is in a sense filtered through his experience. I don’t mean that it’s shot from his point of view—there are many scenes in which he’s not present. But we, the audience, outside of the cryptic general statements by the narrator, only know what Jesse knows. All the simple, often petty emotional interactions are set against a blank background: what’s all this about? D’Ambrose captures perfectly a young person’s incomplete awareness, and indeed confusion, about the disturbing family dynamic into which he has been born.

The director’s odd camera angles—often putting events at a distance—combined with the naturalistic behavior and dialogue (it’s as if a camera just happened to be running off in a corner somewhere), and some extremely creative sound design, create a truly disorienting yet creepy and familiar atmosphere. Everything is invested with secrets, with the important thing being that much of what’s going on is a secret to the people themselves. There’s something basically wrong with everyone’s relationship to reality, an unconscious misunderstanding that affects everything they say and do. In the midst of it all, we see Jesse emerging, in what seems probably D’Ambrose’s autobiographical sense, as a quiet and serious young man who has spent his childhood protecting himself from the storm around him, developing an intense interest in photography.

The film’s title, The Cathedral, is taken from a scene in which Jesse as a boy is copying a picture of a cathedral from a book. Whatever metaphorical path we may follow from there is up to us. The Cathedral is a paradoxically compassionate film; throughout its portrait of distress there’s a commitment to truth focusing our vision.

Often in discussions of that brief period in the early 1970s when there was the promise of a new kind of American film, it seems as if the same few famous names and movies come up: The Godfather, Chinatown, Nashville, and so forth. But perhaps more significant is that a film like Payday could be made, a 1973 picture directed by Daryl Duke, remarkably free in tone and sense of character, with a screenplay by Don Carpenter that has the gritty, honest feel of a good novel, along with a mesmerizing performance from its second-tier star, surrounded by an excellent cast of virtual unknowns. Even in its tenderest moments, the picture stays completely free of formula and sentimentality, which seems almost unthinkable nowadays.

The story concerns two or three hectic days in the life of Maury Dann, a wild, self-centered, party-loving country singer played by Rip Torn, who lives on the road and dangerously near the edge, drinks way too much, and he takes pills so that he can keep moving without having to sleep, traveling from one gig to another, with an entourage of manager, girlfriend, roadies, bandmates and groupies. Caught in the spell of his charisma is a hopelessly naive country girl, played by Elaine Heilveil with a vulnerability that is both humorous and agonizing. Maury quarrels with his friends, gets into fights, screws whomever he can, botches an awkward visit with his ex-wife, and finally gets into the kind of trouble that takes some real ingenuity to get out of.

Among the darkly comic scenes of misbehavior, favorites of mine would include Maury’s visit to his pill-addicted mother, frighteningly aged beyond her years in a rundown wreck of a house; and his attempt to get out of a public appearance by presenting a bottle of Wild Turkey to a DJ while he’s being interviewed on the air.

Rip Torn is intensely watchable in a role that would probably have been less interesting with a more handsome actor. His not quite good looks are undercut by a strong sense of despair and inner dissolution. Torn does all his own singing, and he does quite well. It’s just one more sign of the film’s originality that Maury’s fate does not seem inevitable, only one more stop on a crooked highway.

Daryl Duke coaches wonderful performances from the actors. It seems strange that his career never really went anywhere—other than Payday, his only claim to fame was directing the TV miniseries The Thorn Birds years later. And the film Payday didn’t go much of anywhere either, in terms of box office. The real star, besides Torn, is the Don Carpenter script, which has the rare quality of fully knowing the world it reveals, inside and out. Little known, insufficiently appreciated, Payday is no grand statement, preferring to tell its story in small but significant details. Watching it is like rediscovering the lost spirit of the ‘70s in American movies.

Our connection to the land is one of the central facts of human existence. It’s also true that this connection is not felt so widely or strongly as it used to be, with urban environments growing ever more dominate. Now Spanish director Carla Simón presents a film exploring a family’s deep bond to the farm they live on, and the tragedy of gradual separation from the land. It’s called Alcarràs, and it takes place in a region of that name in Catalonia, the northeast part of Spain that has its own distinctive character and language. And all the characters in the film speak Catalan.

We open with three little kids playing in an abandoned car in a field: Iris and her twin boy cousins, pretending to be in a rocket ship, with the full conviction only kids can summon, while, ominously, an excavator works nearby digging up the field in which they’re playing. The children are part of a large extended family of peach farmers.

We see next a family meeting where bad news is breaking. The grandfather had made a handshake deal with the landowner after the Civil War. The landowner has died, and his son now plans to convert everything to a solar power plant. The older son, Quimet, rages against his father’s foolishness in trusting to a handshake and not getting their rights to the land on a piece of paper, meaning they are now facing the eventual end of their farm.

The rest of the film will let us experience things from the point of view of each member of this family: Quimet’s wife Dolors, fiercely loving and protective; his sisters and brother-in-law, who want to accept working for the solar panel company; his teenage son who tries to be of help but gets the brunt of his father’s anger; and his lonely, sensitive, teenage daughter Mariona, who sees with anxiety the conflict around her, and has trouble understanding. Simón has the remarkable ability to bring us inside the subjective point of view of each character so that our experience is multifaceted. And all the while the film pays close attention to the daily manual labor of tending and harvesting the peach trees; we feel what it’s like to have this close, concentrated relationship to the orchard and the fruit, and to live in this cycle of hands-on work, and we realize that getting rid of this kind of farming by a small landholding class ends up getting rid of the kind of human beings that will grow up within that environment.

Even as Simón draws our attention to the numerous dramas between the adults, and the feelings of the teenagers, she returns again to the play of the children, who enact in a way the family’s desire for stability. She also brings a feminist perspective to the story by giving full weight to the points of view of the women and girls, along with some critical attitudes towards the stubbornness and conflicts of the men.

With such a supple and versatile narrative approach, one can only allow the beauty and fatefulness of this movie to sink into the heart and permeate the senses. Alcarràs is a work of profound feeling and insight, and despite everything, a prayer of hope in the future.

Mike Leigh, the British writer and director, came on the scene in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with a series of films portraying the ups and downs of lower middle class life in England. Perhaps the most representative is one from 1990 entitled Life Is Sweet.

In the film we meet a weird family in a London suburb muddling its way through life. Wendy (Alison Steadman) holds things together with her good-natured energy, always laughing at everything, and she’s more than a trifle overbearing as a mom. Her husband Andy (Jim Broadbent) hates his job managing a kitchen at a restaurant, and he’s a bit of an impractical dreamer, getting suckered into buying a dilapidated snack wagon from a friend played by Stephen Rea. They have two daughters: Natalie (Claire Skinner), the one relatively sane person in the film, who looks upon her family’s antics with puzzled bemusement, and Nicola (Jane Horrocks), an angry, foul-mouthed bulimic who spends her time moping indoors and playing weird sex games with her secret boyfriend, played by David Thewlis.

Leigh pulls off the neat trick of making a comedy about wildly eccentric characters without looking down on them. This is partly due, perhaps, to his famously improvisatory methods, in which the cast members create their characters and dialogue through extensive rehearsals. The people are three-dimensional enough to make us feel as if we’re simply sitting among them as equals, and the laughter is therefore always tinged with self-recognition, and sometimes with more than a little pain. An extensive subplot features Timothy Spall as a friend of the family who attempts to launch a French restaurant—one of the most ludicrous restaurants ever conceived, with menu items so revolting that I was almost rolling on the ground laughing. But the hilarity is tied up with failure and a sad fit of self-destruction. Leigh’s comic world view often winds up on a sad note.

Everyone is in fine form, with Steadman and Broadbent anchoring the show. But the funniest, most vivid, and at the same time the most cartoonish performance is by Jane Horrocks, with her rubbery, squinting little face, screechy voice, and wild mess of hair, smoking furiously and telling everyone off. She’s wonderfully obnoxious, and then we get to see the fear and self-hatred behind the rage. The film’s ultimate simplicity of feeling is its greatest strength. There’s nothing trite about Nicola finding some relief and healing through tears. Neither should the title be taken as a joke. For Leigh, life really is sweet. And the mix of humor and hurt helps make it so.

A friend once teased me, calling me “the boy who cried masterpiece,” because of my over-fondness for that word. But I’m going to use that word again, having recently watched the latest film from Chinese director Qiu Jiongjiong, called A New Old Play. It’s a stunning 3-hour epic drama, with satirical elements, about a fictional Chinese opera troupe, from the 1920s through the early 1970s.

We start with a strange framing device. Two figures emerge from behind a hill, one of them making a sound like a horse, the other like an ox, and pedaling a raggedy looking carriage decked with lights. They are ancient messengers from the underworld, the land of the dead, and they’re here to transport a well-known opera performer named Qiu Fu, and played by Yi Sicheng, to the afterlife after his recent death. Qiu tries to argue with the spirits, but in the end he has no choice. He has to travel with them, first through a shadowy netherworld and eventually across a river to his final home. While wandering through the netherworld, he reminisces about his life and the history of his opera troupe in extended flashbacks which take up the bulk of the film.

The orphaned son of a famous actor, Qiu tags along with his father’s former Sichuan opera company in the 1920s. They laugh at him and try to kick him out, but the master of the troupe sees something in him, and he’s given training. This is an innovative group—China having recently become a republic—that seeks to modernize the art, with one of the key innovations being allowing women to play female characters. We follow Qiu’s story, as a youth, then a young man, to success as the company’s number one clown. There are also many other characters who are granted a point of view in the story: it’s a rich fabric of interesting relationships. Crucially, the personal stories are set against the dramatic stages of 20th century Chinese history.

The director, Qiu, has an eye for the telling detail. For this story, he employs theatrical devices to create a kind of magical realist effect. We feel the intense historical reality while recognizing the artificiality of the form. The sets are obviously painted sets, and the many props and other production details are clearly the kind you might see on a stage, but brought out to beautiful effect by the camera and its many tracking shots across the scenes that are presented for maximum effect. Almost every sequence, every shot in the movie contains something to stimulate, provoke, or puzzle the viewer. The historical reality is conveyed through the slightest means. When Mao takes over the country, the new training of the theater company to conform to party doctrine is darkly comical, as we can see its effect on the already jaded performers. The film’s title comes to mind here: A New Old Play. It’s like the lyric from that song by The Who: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The film doesn’t flinch from recalling the tragedies of Chinese history. It covers the famine that killed millions in the ‘50s. It covers the so-called Cultural Revolution in the ‘60s, with its stupid scapegoating of an entire generation. We see a prisoner in one of the work camps building a brick enclosure that will eventually entrap him. But the symbolism goes even beyond politics. Those entering the underworld must first drink from a stream of forgetfulness. Forgetting is the ultimate price. But this film, this masterpiece, A New Old Play, won’t let us forget.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline takes its title from a book by Andreas Malme. It’s not really a “how to” book, but argues that climate activists are going to have to do more than just demonstrate. They’re going to have to commit sabotage if they hope to help prevent the worst catastrophes ahead of us. Daniel Goldhaber’s film turns this idea into a thriller about a team of eight people planning to blow up a major pipeline in Texas. He co-wrote the film with Jordan Sjol and one of the lead actors, Ariela Barer.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline bears resemblance to many classic heist films, in which a team of characters, with their individual talents and flaws, comes together to pull off a big job. Here, the story’s main thread, the long and careful preparation for their action, is interrupted as we go along by flashbacks giving the motivations and background of each character. The one cinematic parallel that comes to mind is Reservoir Dogs, although in tone and subject matter the films are not at all alike.

Ariela Barer plays Xochitl, a young woman from Long Beach, California, growing up in the shadow of the oil refineries that she blames for her mother’s early death. One of her best friends is Theo (Sasha Lane), a lesbian who’s been diagnosed with leukemia, and sees environmental pollution as the cause. Xochitl also meets and befriends Shaun (Marcus Scriber), part of a divestment movement in their Chicago college. Shawn recruits an unlikely ally into their group, Dwayne (Jake Weary), a blue collar Texan whom you might expect to be conservative, except that oil companies have used the device of “eminent domain” to seize land that is part of his inherited homestead. The film uses the character of Dwayne to illustrate that not everyone fighting the climate crisis is going to be a left-wing type. His special usefulness in the team is that he knows the landscape around the target like the back of his hand. Rounding out the team is Michael (Forrest Goodluck) a Native American who has turned himself into a bomb expert, and finally, a goofy young white couple whose casual attitudes about the whole thing are meant to set off alarm bells for the audience.

This is not a polemic. There’s room for argument, for example from Michael’s mother, a more traditional non-violent activist, and from Theo’s girlfriend, played by Jayme Lawson, who joins the group because she’s deeply in love with Theo, but is continually alarmed by the risk and danger of the enterprise, asking if this is all worth the potential consequences. The picture works very well as a thriller, outside of any political context—it’s gripping, suspenseful, and cleverly plotted. The story of Michael, the bomb expert, is especially dramatic and striking. The film is not above using the threat of catastrophe to get our pulses racing, and with Michael that includes every time he goes about crafting the bomb that they’re planning to use.

At the same time, the movie is daring in its convictions. A story like this, conveying ideas that are not mainstream, to put it mildly, can be ruined by special pleading or the manipulation of sentiment. Goldhaber does none of that. Here is a gang of idealistic misfits: approve of them or don’t, either way the story will force you to think. How to Blow Up a Pipeline brilliantly uses the fictional to raise awareness of the actual.

There’s a story that after a certain American movie critic spent some time in Paris in the late 50s reading and listening to the new breed of French film  critics, he sent a letter to a critic in the States asking, “Who the hell is Howard Hawks?” It’s true that the French elevated Hawks, a seasoned Hollywood director, into their critical pantheon, but he really wasn’t that obscure. He’d been nominated for an Oscar for Sergeant York in 1941, and he’d helmed plenty of hits through the years. But most film reviewers didn’t pay much attention to directors in the old days, and Hawks was also never identified with a single studio—he was an independent, hiring himself out to whoever wanted his services. This gave him greater creative control than your average Hollywood director, but less publicity.

He directed 40 films, and more good ones than I have time to mention. 1930’s The Dawn Patrol, a World War One air pilot story done for the Fox studio, has a great sense of male camaraderie that became typical of a Hawks picture, with terrific flying sequences and none of the stilted dialogue that you see with most early sound films. (Later he was to top himself with the great air pilot film Only Angels Have Wings.) In 1932, he took on Scarface for Howard Hughes, with Paul Muni playing a criminal loosely based on Al Capone. Of all the early gangster movies, this one has the most taut, physical style, and the most brutally realistic point of view. It was controversial for supposedly glamorizing crime, making it look fun, but that’s really just the exuberance of Hawk’s storytelling, and the dialogue of the brilliant Ben Hecht, who went on to do five more films with Hawks.

Hawks was good at comedies too. Twentieth Century, made in 1934 for Columbia, features John Barrymore and Carole Lombard verbally tearing each other to shreds. Bringing Up Baby, for RKO in 1938, is arguably the screwiest screwball comedy ever, with Cary Grant as a confused paleontologist pursued by the wildly eccentric Katharine Hepburn in her funniest work ever. It didn’t make money, but it’s become a classic since then. Then there’s His Girl Friday in 1940, a version of the old play The Front Page, but with the reporter played by a woman this time, Rosalind Russell. In the lead role, Cary Grant gives his greatest performance, as the slick-talking, totally unscrupulous editor Walter Burns. The dialogue is so fast and funny that you barely have time to catch your breath.

Hawks had a way of attracting good writers. In addition to Hecht, for Warner Brothers in the late ‘40s he had Jules Furthman and the novelist William Faulkner helping him out. To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep, both with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, feature an unforgettable mixture of toughness and cool, especially The Big Sleep, in my opinion the best detective movie ever made. Hawks did plenty of westerns too, including Red River in ’48 with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, in which he pioneered an overlapping dialogue technique. John Ford saw it and half-kiddingly said that Hawks had somehow tricked John Wayne into actually acting. In his one musical, 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the producer saw Marilyn Monroe performing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and said “What? Who knew she could sing?” But that was another thing about Hawks—he could bring an actor’s hidden talents to the surface.

So, who the hell was Howard Hawks? A tall, imposing, distinguished man from the Midwest, radiating a quiet authority, the consummate professional, he is generally considered one of the five or six greatest directors who ever lived.

Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese officer stationed on Lubang, a small island in the Philippines, in 1944. In 1974, he was discovered to still be there, having stayed on that island for the past thirty years, continuing to believe that the war was still going on, surviving in the jungle, and obeying his original orders not to give himself up. There were other similar cases in the Pacific War—his was the first one to become famous, after which the idea of a lone Japanese soldier stranded on an island, in his mind still at war, became a perennial source of amazement. Onoda is an epic drama about the life of this man, an international co-production helmed by French director Arthur Harari. At first glance, it might seem an unpromising subject for a film, but as so often happens, the truth is stranger than we might imagine. In the States, it’s been released as Onoda: Ten Thousand Nights in the Jungle.

The picture opens in 1974, with a young man traveling to Lubang, setting up a camp near a river in the island, and then loudly playing an old military song from the 1940s, a song that was significant to Onoda and other veterans of the war. Then we see an older man in a meadow, in a Japanese uniform, wearing a large section of turf and long grass on his back as camouflage. He hears the music. His eyes widen ever so slightly before he starts moving towards the river from which the sound is coming.

From this point, the movie flashes back to the young Onoda, played by Yuya Endo, acting drunk in what looks like an army barracks, a man with obvious disciplinary problems. It is 1944. A major enters with his staff and interviews Onoda. He could throw the book at him, but instead he offers him a position as an intelligence officer in a commando unit. This special class had a different strategy than the regular military. Instead of fighting to the death or committing suicide as many did, Onoda’s unit is taught to stay alive at all costs while avoiding capture or surrender. He was to organize a guerilla-type resistance on the island, and to destroy the air strip and the pier before the Americans came.

As it turns out, other officers on the island outranked him and blocked his plans. The Americans did invade, and after heavy casualties Onoda was left with only a few men, to whom he revealed his mission. Eventually the Americans left, but the Filipinos were hostile, and without any notice of what had happened, the soldiers proceeded with their mission, surviving off the land and by raiding local farmers, all the time waiting for the promised return of the imperial army to the island. And this waiting went on, and on, for years, and eventually decades, and Onoda’s soldiers died or deserted, finally leaving him alone.

It’s fairly easy to describe this story to you, but to make a film that effectively recreates the long, grueling experience of these desperate men is a remarkable achievement. Onoda is almost three hours long, and it’s fascinating from beginning to end. It’s a story of endurance, disappointment, delusion, and even some humor. Ultimately, though, it’s a portrait of loneliness. As the film ends, we seem to have gone through every possible emotion there is, and finally we are left with a profound sadness, a tragic vision of life. Onoda is an unforgettable, compelling experience.

Saint Omer is the first dramatic film by director Alice Diop, famous up until now in France as a director of documentaries. It’s inspired by Diop’s own experience, attending the trial of a woman in a town in northern France accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter. It wasn’t merely this criminal case that impelled Diop to make the film, but her own emotional reaction to it.

The main character is an author named Rama, played by Kayije Kagame, who has proposed to her publisher that she write a book about this case, and frame it through the Greek myth of Medea. Rama is black—her parents came from Senegal, and although she was born and raised in Paris, she knows how racial ideas can make her feel like an outsider in her own country. The young defendant in the trial, Laurence Coly, played by Guslagie Malanda, is a Senegalese immigrant who entered into a transactional type of relationship with an older married white man who she claims didn’t want their child. She admits leaving her daughter on a beach at high tide and walking away, after which the baby drowned. The astonishing thing is that she’s pleading not guilty, claiming that some relatives in Senegal had put a curse on her that caused her actions. Her complex story includes conflict with her mother, who in fact sits in a front row in the court room. Lack of trust caused her not to tell her mother that she was having a baby. In effect, as an undocumented immigrant she was completely isolated from anyone who might have helped her. She gave birth alone in her apartment, with not even a midwife present.

As the trial proceeds, Rama becomes more and more affected. As it happens, she is also with a white man, and she also has a difficult relationship with her own mother. Alone in her apartment in this town of Saint Omer, she broods, dreams, and remembers. The director, Diop, has a spare and rigorous style. She doesn’t try to jazz up the trial scenes—everything is filmed in a dry, straightforward manner. Even the flashbacks Rama has to memories of her childhood, when we witness her as a girl bewildered by her mother’s behavior, it’s presented as matter-of-fact. This is an unusual and very effective technique: the past is just as substantial a reality to our main character as the present.

Malanda’s performance as the defendant, Coly, is like the deadly stillness in the eye of a hurricane. Everyone speaking in the court must stand, including the prosecutor and the defense attorney. The one exception is the presiding judge, a woman, who sits and interrogates the defendant at length herself. For the most part Diop films everyone from straight ahead. The testimony, the details of Coly’s actions, the narrative of the killing, are all wrapped in the mystery of why—why exactly did this happen? The film deliberately doesn’t explain things, instead leaving the unexplainable out there for the viewer to deal with. At one point, Rama laments that she was so wrapped up in the tragic details of the defendant’s life, that she momentarily forgot to consider the child’s point of view.

Saint Omer (Diop has named her film after the town in which the trial occurs) creates an atmosphere of painful uncertainty. Like the real case it was based on, there is no easy answer, no logical solution by which to sum everything up. We must face the fact that there are things about life we will never completely understand.

In 2010, the Iranian government ruled that the director Jafar Panahi wouldn’t be allowed to make any more films. Now, even during periods of house arrest, Panahi has managed to cleverly get around the restrictions to continue making movies. His most recent film is called No Bears (the title is a joke that I won’t spoil), and it shows how he can take even the smallest slice of his life and turn it into art.

We’re in a town near the border between Iran and Turkey. A man and woman are arguing about a passport that is supposed to facilitate crossing the border out of Iran. She refuses to go without him, saying it’s unacceptable for her to go first and wait for him to follow, because she never wants to be separated from him again. Cut. It turns out that this is actually a scene being filmed for a movie. And Panahi, playing himself, is directing from afar—he’s renting a room from some generous residents of a village a few miles away, and from there he supervises the filming on his computer, sending instructions to the people at the site about the needed scenes and shots.

During a break in shooting, Panahi wanders around the village taking photographs of the people and scenery. Later, several men visit him in the house he’s renting. One of them informs him that his son is engaged to be married to a young woman, and that the wedding is coming soon. But some villagers claim that the woman has been secretly seeing another young man without social standing. It appears that while wandering about the town, Panahi took a photo which unintentionally showed the young woman talking with her lover. The men are now asking that he turn over the photo to them, to help forestall this local scandal. Panahi says he has no such picture. The men don’t believe him. As the film goes on, their demands become more insistent. He must show them all the photos in his camera and then swear that he’s telling the truth. Panahi doesn’t lose his composure. He eventually does swear to there being no such photograph. But of course, the doubt lingers.

So here we have the film we’re watching, No Bears, which includes this story of the photo. But then there’s the film within the film: the one that Panahi is making about people trying to get across the border. In both cases, the story involves a couple that are in some kind of trouble, albeit for different reasons. As the movie goes on, an odd thing happens. It becomes harder to distinguish which parts are from the film he’s making, and which are from the film we’re watching. They blend together. We think, this is all scripted, right? Or is it? Is one of the stories real, or part of it? The confusion is compounded by the actors in the film Panahi is making starting to argue with him about his decisions. And none of this is meant as a trick or a gimmick—Panahi isn’t saying “look how clever I am”—the blending of truth and fiction is a natural result of the director’s casual off-the-cuff style. And in so doing we realize, we experience, the purpose for which Panahi makes films: to illuminate reality through art, so that the meaning and urgency of our lives is manifest on film. No Bears is another brilliant work of art created seemingly out of almost nothing.

But there’s one thing I know that is real, unfortunately. After he finished making No Bears, the Iranian government accused him again of spreading anti-Islamic propaganda and they sent him to prison. Around the world, people who love the cinema are demanding: free Panahi.

If I had to pick one filmmaker who was probably an alien from outer space, it would be Jacques Tati. In his movies, people are viewed as the most awkward and absurd creatures imaginable, like weird puppets that are made to dance in arcane, goofy social rituals. The humor is drier than dry—you are just as likely to gape with an open mouth and puzzled expression as you are to laugh. I think the best introduction to his work is his second film, from 1953, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday.

Monsieur Hulot, played by Tati himself, is an overly courteous, middle-aged bachelor who walks with a peculiar half-step, smokes a pipe, and acts decisively even though he has no idea what’s going on. He goes on holiday to the beach in an odd little car that is constantly backfiring, and we follow him as he interacts with the other vacationers at a seaside hotel. There is no plot. The camera just observes the curious behavior of people “enjoying themselves,” often with the accompaniment of an insipid “easy listening” type musical theme.

There are laugh-out-loud moments, as when a collapsible canoe snaps shut over Hulot while he is rowing in it, or when his escaped spare tire gets mistaken for a wreath at a funeral, or the brilliant ending sequence involving a small shed full of fireworks. But more often, Tati simply focuses on little details of daily behavior, with maniacal precision. The exaggerated body language exhibited by the holiday-goers as they play cards, stroll about, or bow to one another in greeting; the punctuating sounds of routine, such as the squeak of the dining room door as it opens and closes (the soundtrack is as full of amusing sound effects as it is almost empty of dialogue); Hulot’s hesitant navigation of the simplest physical actions, such as sitting or taking his hat off; all produce the effect of seeing human interaction divested of customary meaning and invested with the ridiculousness of distance. But never, I should note, with contempt; there is no hatred or anger in Tati’s universe, only a blind, well-intentioned lunge forward to the next challenge.

When Buster Keaton was asked what he thought of Tati he said, “I don’t know what you’d call him. He is just out to be artistic.” This, of course, was not meant as praise. Indeed, Tati violated the time-tested rules of comedy. He deliberately ignored the idea of building up to a gag. In M. Hulot’s Holiday he takes the gags apart, presents set-ups without payoffs, gags without set-ups, deflates the gag before it can build, or does without set-ups or gags altogether, playing with the audience’s expectations that there should be some. I think one needs to be in a certain frame of mind in order to really enjoy the film—relaxed, unconcerned with schedules or appointments, and free for the time being of any rancor or resentment, especially towards oneself. Yes, Tati is something of an acquired taste, but well worth your time.

The Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, are Belgian filmmakers who’ve been making movies for 45 years. What makes their work distinct is the focus on ordinary, working and middle class characters facing ethical and other dilemmas that reflect problems people are having in the modern world. There is typically no musical score in a Dardenne film. We are meant to experience something close to actuality, when we don’t have music emphasizing our moments. The handheld camera also plays a major role, closely following the characters in their movements, an intimate witness to the immediacy of everyday life. Through sixteen features, I can’t help but marvel at the consistency of their style, in movies that are personal and believable while exploring important themes such as poverty, homelessness, single parents, employee rights, guilt and forgiveness. Well, they just released their seventeenth film, entitled Tori and Lokita. Guess what? It’s one of their best.

The film opens in Belgium with Lokita, a teenage girl from Benin, a country in Africa, answering questions from a woman we don’t see. Lokita claims to have come to Belgium with her brother Tori, who’s already been granted asylum. But the woman questioning her finds inconsistencies in her story: she somehow found her brother after being separated for years—how? Lokita gets stuck trying to answer, and the session ends with her asylum hearing postponed. We then see her with Tori, a young boy, about 12, and it’s immediately clear that they have a deep bond of love and trust between them. Yet fairly soon it becomes clear that they’re not related. They met at some point in the long journey to Belgium, and became attached to each other. It was Tori’s idea to claim that he’s her brother, in an attempt to Lokita her papers that she needs in order to live and work in Belgium.

The Dardennes found two wonderful non-professionals to play their lead characters: Pablo Schils is Tori, and Joely Mbundu is especially good as Lokita: determined but sometimes overwhelmed with feelings, she’s come to rely on Tori’s calming influence to endure the life of a migrant. And what a precarious life they lead. They work for a restaurant owner who happens to be a minor crime boss, using them as couriers in his drug business. Lokita tries to send money to her mother and siblings, but the traffickers who got Tori and her there are still around, harassing them for more money. And of course, the police are always a threat as well.

A crisis is reached when their boss makes Lokita work in his drug factory for three months in exchange for the false papers he’s promised, three months in which she’ll be separated from Tori. But Tori will scramble to find a way to help her.

The film shows us how harrowing and dangerous it is for migrant kids to navigate life under the radar. These two are exploited by everybody around them. But this isn’t some pedantic message picture. It’s a suspense film, more nerve-wracking than most because the characters and their situation seem absolutely true. The Dardennes know how to build tension without sacrificing reality. Tori and Lokita shows the struggle to survive of two young people who have only their deep love for one another to sustain them. It’s not to be missed.

After failing to achieve much box office success in Hollywood, the Vienna-born director Josef von Sternberg went to Germany on the invitation of the famous actor Emil Jannings, with whom he had previously worked, to make a film from Heinrich Mann’s popular novel Professor Unrath. The result, released in 1930, was The Blue Angel, a stunning international success, one of Sternberg’s greatest pictures, that also launched the career of Marlene Dietrich.

Jannings plays a stuffy provincial teacher at a boy’s boarding school, hopelessly old-fashioned, mocked and despised by the students. When he discovers that they are sneaking out at night to a local nightclub called The Blue Angel, he goes himself in hopes of catching them and reprimanding the club for corrupting minors. There he sees the main attraction, a singer named Lola Lola (played by Dietrich), but instead of saving his students from her bad influence, he himself becomes infatuated. This relationship leads him down the road to humiliation and a complete loss of dignity.

Sternberg was a master of light and shadow. The Blue Angel displays his great instincts for the telling shot, ingenious use of screen space, and visual mystery. The scenes with the professor walking alone through the streets on the way to the nightclub seem to sum up an entire visual style in German film. And although some of it seems static compared to the director’s later work, it’s also earthier, less baroque, more emotional and moving.

Marlene Dietrich was 28 at the time, and had been in movies for a decade, mostly in supporting roles. Sternberg chose her for the role of Lola against all advice, and of course she turned out to be perfect. The image of her singing “Falling in Love Again” in her top hat and black stockings has become legendary. (The outrageously tacky nightclub costumes are a hoot). But she’s also convincing in her quiet scenes with Jannings—tender, gently humorous without mockery or contempt. Even later when she is cruel to him, there is sadness mixed in with it. Dietrich’s confident sexuality caused a sensation on the film’s release, but the ambiguity of her performance—she really does love the old man—has given it staying power.

In truth, the film presents contradictory messages. Overtly, it tells a simple story of degeneration—an upright old man foolishly gives in to his carnal nature and is punished for it. The trouble with this story is that the professor is clearly a strict and unlovable authority figure at the beginning of the film, but is humanized by his love for the cabaret singer. Sternberg is always poking fun at the teacher’s prudishness, as when we see him staring dumfounded at the naked breasts on a statue. The film’s sympathies are secretly with Lola and her world. But in 1930, audiences could only be treated to decadence if it was wrapped in morality, and thus we have The Blue Angel‘s double message: sex will free you, and it will destroy you.

In this period before dubbing or subtitles, movies were often shot twice in different languages—in this case, German and English. The German version of The Blue Angel is superior. This essential film survives in a gorgeous print that seems almost pristine, on Blu Ray and DVD.

A young black man is rejected by his religious mother when she finds out he’s gay. She kicks him out, and he ends up homeless and living in shelters and on the streets. But then—he joins the Marines. That’s the story of The Inspection, the debut feature film written and directed by Elegance Bratton. And it’s all based closely on Bratton’s own story.

Proof that he has good instincts as a director is established in one of the movie’s first scenes. Ellis French, the main character played by Jeremy Pope, has come to knock on the door of his mother’s apartment, who won’t let him in until he tells her he needs his birth certificate in order to join the Marines. The mom is played by Gabrielle Union, and the conversation they have in her living room is a beautifully understated piece of work. A less sophisticated artist would hash out the issues that they have with each other in this conversation, providing a plot exposition for the audience. Instead, we can just notice how they look at one another, their gestures, attitudes, and quiet mannerisms, and this tells us the real story in emotional terms far more skillfully than any speeches could. In fact, it’s only in one bitter comment by the mom at the end of the scene that the film first lets us know explicitly that Ellis is gay.

Most of the rest of the movie takes place during boot camp on a South Carolina base. Basic training in the Marines is legendary for being extremely difficult, and from the beginning of the film we observe the trainers aggressively breaking down the recruits with yelling, insults, and punishments. The head instructor is a mean, tough, charismatic black man named Laws, beautifully portrayed by Bokeem Woodbine. He seems to sense vulnerability in Ellis French, and starts to get on his case right away. It’s already a grueling experience, but the fear is, what if someone finds out that he’s gay?

The time of the story is 2005. The Iraq War is ongoing. And the military still has a policy called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It means that gay people could be soldiers, but only if they were closeted. Soldiers admitting that they were gay would be discharged. That didn’t stop other soldiers from harassing and persecuting someone in their ranks that they thought was gay.

French must therefore hide his sexuality in order to achieve his goal of becoming a Marine. This is a constant undercurrent of the film, but it’s not the whole story. Bratton goes into great detail depicting the three-month long basic training process. We experience the sheer physical strain that is part of boot camp, as well as the abusive behavior designed to break men down. But it’s not an anti-military or for that matter, pro-military movie. It’s a movie about a situation a lot of people go through, and what that’s like.  Overcoming incredible obstacles in order to graduate is also a transformative experience, for French and all the others. They attain a kind of fearlessness, and a devotion to protecting the Marine to their right and their left, that shakes loose a lot of previous notions and behaviors that weren’t serving them.

Now, the drill sergeant Rosales, played by Raúl Castillo, has the job of building recruits up after they’ve been torn down—he’s tough on French, but nonjudgmental, and this represents a critique of what we usually think of as masculinity. French knows that he’s gay, and he isn’t trying to change that, but by becoming a Marine he hopes to prove his worthiness to his mother. Rosales shows him that he doesn’t need to prove anything.

The Inspection is a thoughtful and well-crafted film that asks important questions about manhood and identity.

There’s a sports metaphor I’ve heard used, in basketball mostly, when they say that a player is “in a zone.” Every shot seems to go in; whenever they touch the ball, something good happens. Well, there are some rare cases when I think a filmmaker gets into a zone, and everything the director tries seems to work and to further the artistic purpose of the picture. The result is what we usually would call a “great film,” or even a “masterpiece.” This metaphor has come to mind most powerfully for me when watching one of my favorite movies: from 1954, directed by Akira Kurosawa, Seven Samurai.

The samurai genre was very popular in Japan, but other than some screenplay writing, this seems to have been Kurosawa’s first work in that tradition. He wrote the story with his longtime colleagues Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni. It’s about a peasant village in 16th century Japan that is being harassed by a large group of bandits. Some of the villagers decide that they must hire a group of samurai to defend themselves. They have nothing to offer but food, so they seek out a destitute warrior named Kambei, played by Takashi Shimura, a great ronin fallen on hard times. He accepts their plea, and then approaches five other samurai, each with distinct personalities, weapons, and fighting styles. These six become seven when an uncouth character named Kikuchiyo, played by Toshiro Mifune, starts tagging along. It turns out that he’s a peasant himself. After establishing their presence in the village, the samurai prepare for the impending bandit attack.

Describing the plot doesn’t really convey the epic nature of the film. It’s 3½ hours long, but don’t let that intimidate you. It’s consistently involving, fascinating, and exciting. Carefully, each character, including the peasants, is presented with subtlety and attention. Relationships and complex plot strands emerge. Then when the action starts, the compelling narrative flow is thrilling and awe-inspiring. Kurosawa used several moving cameras running simultaneously in the battle scenes, along with telephoto lenses so that the actors would not be distracted. Consequently we find ourselves totally immersed in the experience.

Shimura is excellent as the wise and steady-handed leader. Mifune’s performance is a marvel of wild and eccentric self-expression. Kurosawa had already become famous internationally with Rashomon four years earlier but this movie exploded onto world cinema with an impact hard to even imagine today. Yes, Hollywood did a western version called The Magnificent Seven that is quite entertaining, but doesn’t come close to the original. Widely and (correctly in my opinion) considered one of the greatest motion pictures of all time, Seven Samurai is a true epic of cinema that movie lovers owe it to themselves to see.

There’s a mystery at the heart of Hold Me Tight, the latest film from French director Mathieu Almaric, adapted by him from a play by Claudine Galéa. The story opens with Clarisse, a wife and mother played by Vicky Krieps, playing some kind of card game with a deck of Polaroid photos spread out on her bed. Then she goes to her children’s bedroom and looks at her two pre-teen kids, Lucie and Paul, sleeping. She packs a bag, sneaks out of the house, backs an old car out of the garage, and drives away. Gradually we learn, just from her self-talk, that she’s leaving for good. But we don’t know why.

Almaric has made his name as an actor in over 100 films and TV shows, a familiar face in French film, and then internationally, with roles in films by Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, and others, including playing a villain in one of the James Bond movies. But all this time, he’s also been directing, with over 20 features and shorts since 1990. As a director he demonstrates a real affinity with actors, as you might expect, allowing them to participate in the invention and elaboration of characters. And he specializes in depicting unstable subjective points of view, with a flowing, wandering camera that might seem aimless at first but eventually reveals an inner logic. He made the right choice of actress: Krieps is a sensitive performer with a wide yet subtle range of expression. And this is one of her best so far.

While driving, Clarisse listens to a recording of her daughter Lucie practicing piano. She smokes cigarettes, laughs, and seems to talk directly to her daughter. Flash back to scenes of Lucie playing at home, with Clarisse talking with her husband and their son looking on. As the film goes on, we continue to have these fragmentary flashbacks. It seemed to be a happy family. On the other hand, the parents do quarrel, although that doesn’t seem out of the ordinary, really.

Clarisse’s journey doesn’t seem to have a direction. We see her in a roadside bar, for instance, just listening to the idle chatter of the customers. Increasingly, instead of flashbacks, we see Clarisse’s family as it continues to go through life without her. The kids get older; Lucie becomes a teenager and has an opportunity to perform in a piano competition. Strangely, Clarisse’s husband never makes an attempt to find her. It’s as if he already knows that there’s no point in looking, because their relationship has gone past a point of no return. Then we find it difficult to distinguish reality from imagination: Clarisse seems to see all these things that are happening without her, but how can that be?

The solution to the mystery begins to be revealed about half-way through, yet the odd thing is that the film stays suspenseful. It doesn’t really matter that we know the secret now. The point is to display this person’s free floating awareness cinematically, in a direct way, without distance. We’ve been brought into the fragile consciousness of Clarisse, a woman of constantly shifting thoughts and emotions. The picture becomes a spellbinder because of the masterful performance of Vicky Krieps. There’s a sea of emotion rolling inside her, expressed by her face in precise and delicate moments of wonder, sadness, fear, enjoyment, amusement, and confusion. Krieps goes all the way in every word and action in this film—she does not hold back.

Yes, there is a secret to Hold Me Tight that I won’t give away—so what I will tell you is: this movie captures an emotional truth that pierces the heart.

The Quiet Girl, from Irish director Colm Bairéad, is a quiet movie. It’s the story of Cáit, a nine-year-old Irish girl played by Catherine Clinch, who is painfully shy and withdrawn, only speaking when she’s spoken to. So quiet is she that other kids think she’s weird, and when they laugh at her she sometimes wets herself, which then makes them mock her even more. At home she’s treated as a nuisance and is scapegoated for the family’s problems. The mother is always stressed out and overwhelmed. The father is neglectful and distant. No wonder this girl is quiet.

Now the mother is preparing to have a fifth child, and the parents decide to send Cáit to a couple of older relatives, cousins, who live a great distance away on a dairy farm. The woman, Eibhlín, played by Carrie Crowley, is very kind, and she gently welcomes Cáit to their home and the routines and chores of the household. But the husband, Seán, played by Andrew Bennett, seems reluctant to get to know the girl and acts rather stern when showing her how to do tasks on the farm. Cáit is still quiet and on her guard.

Most of the dialogue is in Irish, the original Gaelic language of Ireland. There are still parts of the countryside that speak Irish primarily, although English is the language of the country’s majority and its public life. It’s a rare film that is made in Irish these days, but there’s a yearning among many to keep the language alive, and I’m guessing that might be at least part of the reason that The Quiet Girl became a surprise hit at home, and eventually an entry for International Film at the Oscars.

I don’t remember the film expressly telling us the time period of the story—we see TV and cars, no internet or cell phones. Just from the automobiles, I would say the story takes place in the 1980s. But this is a film of country life, so there’s something timeless and almost outside history about it. Another way this is a quiet movie is that Bairéad focuses our attention on the stillness and beauty of nature, the gentle sounds and sights of country life. To watch the film is to go through a sense of slowing down, letting go of the perpetual movement and anxiety that seems to permeate modern life.

The older couple has their own drama. They’ve been stricken by loss. Their gradual cultivation of a bond with the girl is quite moving—then they face a new problem: the girl’s parents are eventually going to want her back. Still, all this is primarily the girl’s story. It’s her point of view that holds us in quiet and stillness. The hurt and the fear are not to be surrendered easily. Bairéad carefully tends to his character’s feelings. His style is very patient. In the end, we find that our hearts are breaking. The Quiet Girl is a journey towards love, and what a difficult thing it can be to get there.

Humility and innocence are difficult to portray well in fiction or drama. The imperfection of human beings means that artists will more readily create believable bad characters than good ones. But in our hearts we believe in the good, most of us, and in that way animals may come to symbolize for us our intuitions about natural goodness. Eo, the new film from veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, tells the story of a donkey.

Eo, spelled with just the letters E and O, is his name, or rather the name given to him by a young woman who is part of an animal act in a small Polish circus. The name imitates the sound donkeys make: think Eeyore from the Winnie-the-Pooh books. Anyway, the circus gets broken up because of animal welfare violations, and Eo is sent to a farm in the country where he is safe. But circumstances cause him to break through a fence, get lost in the woods, and then endure a lengthy series of human owners who range from friendly to careless, neglectful, and downright cruel.

Donkeys have long been associated with humility. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have rode into Jerusalem on one, instead of the prouder and more imperious horse. You may have heard or read that Eo is a remake of Au Hasard Balthazar, a 1966 film by Robert Bresson. Yes, they share the same narrative device: following the life of a donkey as it goes through many owners. For Bresson, however, spirituality was impersonal, and his masterpiece conveys that vision of goodness that transcends human flaws. The story of Eo, however, is different. Skolimowski is more of a dramatist, for one thing, and his aim is to evoke the experience of life from the point of view of the donkey—a very difficult thing, impossible really, but in the effort of doing so in a film becomes tremendously moving. For all these reasons I don’t consider it a bona fide remake, since the conception is essentially of a separate kind.

The imagining of a donkey’s life journey is created through many different narrative and visual strategies. Eo endures everything that happens with the indomitable patience that, we are made to see, is a quality of his being rather than something that he learned. All the little human dramas that surround him during the course of the film, no matter how important they seem to the human characters, seem just paltry to us in the context of the stark awareness that is Eo’s experience. Domesticated animals, in whatever sense, are in a condition of slavery, and this fact takes on many profound nuances when we take the point of the view of the animal. The experience can be blissful, scary, indifferent, or incomprehensibly cruel, depending on the owners. Skolimowski’s purpose is to expand our own consciousness to include the subjectivity of animals, which in turn forces the narrow confinement of our human thoughts and purposes to open up, even just a little, to a more cosmic sense of reality.

At one crucial point in the story, a culminating moment of trauma, the film presents a nightmarish series of images contrasting our mechanistic and robotic attempts to imitate animal nature with the actual sensations of beings who are alive just like us. Eo presents the mirror of nature to our own sorry human condition, while at the same time planting our consciousness in a presence that is far greater than what we take for granted in our world: the presence of humility and innocence, in the tale of our failures and our fondest dreams.

The story of the radical art photographer Nan Goldin, and how she led a movement against the Sackler family, the billionaires who pushed OxyContin.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. That’s the title of the new movie by Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. It starts with a basic framing story, a story of activism. We see Nan Goldin, one of the more famous American art photographers, spearheading a campaign against the Sacklers, a billionaire family that owns Purdue Pharma. Beginning in the 1990s, Purdue heavily promoted OxyContin, and other opioids, as a safe and non-addictive medication for serious pain. Hundreds of thousands of people did become addicted, and Goldin was one of them. There were many thousands of deaths from overdose. Goldin was lucky not to have succumbed, although she came close. The organization she founded is called PAIN, Prescription Addiction Intervention Now. They advocate for state-funded treatment and for a social policy of harm reduction.

One of Goldin’s central goals was to make the Sackler family pay for the damage it did. And her prominence in the art world gave her a point of attack. The Sacklers have their names on many rooms, departments, and exhibits in art museums around the world, having given millions of dollars to these institutions and donated many priceless artworks as well. This, of course, makes them respectable in the eyes of the establishment, the rich upper class that uses philanthropy as PR. As the film opens, we see Goldin’s group enacting a demonstration and a die-in at the Met in New York, with people lying on their backs as if dead, surrounded by prescription bottles for OxyContin. The goal is to make the museums stop taking Sackler money, and after that make them take the Sackler family’s names off the walls and doors and plaques in all the museums.

A normal documentary would give us this story alone, and make that the point. But although this framing device stays with us from the beginning of the film to the end, and is important, Poitras is also interested in Nan Goldin herself. Gradually, through Goldin’s own words, and that of other friends and witnesses, we learn her life story. She grew up in the Boston area, in a suffocating family with parents desperate to be like everyone else. Her older sister Barbara rebelled, and was sent to an institution, eventually dying of suicide at 18.

Barbara’s story became a central inspiration for Nan, who ran away, got kicked out of schools, and was actually sent to a foster family as if she were an orphan. Breaking free in her 20s, she entered the Boston gay subculture, drag queens and transgender people her best friends. Her informal, self-taught photography of this group got attention in the art world. Eventually she moved to New York, and the film becomes a document not only of her life, but of the many amazing friends and colleagues in the New York art world and gay community. Her slide shows were major events affirming that this community exists and has a right to. It was a life on the margins, poor in money terms, but rich in love. There was a lot of pain as well, the confronting of past abuse, the drama of what she called “sexual dependency,” and then came the tragedy of AIDS and the unspeakable toll it took. But it’s the sense of great, overpowering love within a community that more than anything we take away from this film.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed: this stark title is from something Goldin’s older sister wrote before taking her life. The film celebrates both aspects with passion. Watching it for me was to recognize at a deeper level what is truly important in life.

Sarah Polley is a Canadian filmmaker, an actress who eventually moved behind the camera to direct. Her work includes four excellent feature films. And I think the best one is her latest, an intense feminist drama called Women Talking.

In a rural religious community, where people wear old-fashioned clothes and travel by horse and buggy, the women and some girls (we are told in a prologue) have been waking up in the morning for years realizing that they’ve been raped and abused in their sleep. The male leaders told them that it must be the action of ghosts or Satan, until one night a woman woke up in the middle of a rape and saw one of the attackers. He ran away, but he was confronted later and confessed, and he named a group of accomplices, who were also members of the community. These men used a cattle anesthetic to knock their victims out before raping them. They were taken by authorities to be indicted, and the rest of the men went to town to bail them out and bring them home before trial. The action opens while they’re gone, when the women of the community gather to decide what to do.

One of the elder women, played by Frances McDormand, says they must forgive the men and go on as before, or be barred from the kingdom of heaven. It’s clear that there are two other options as well, to stay and fight the men who want to cover it up, or to leave. The arguments by the women on the pros and cons of these options take up most of the running time of the film. The talking is not vague or abstract, but exactly the kind of dialogue people might engage in while facing an emergency. At the same time the director, Polley, maintains the tension—our confinement to this isolated farm helps make the events within it fascinating and suspenseful.

The film is adapted from a novel by Miriam Toews, the story based on actual incidents in a Canadian Mennonite community in Bolivia about 15 years ago. Polley has removed much of the specifics—in the film we don’t know what religious sect is involved, or where they are exactly. Anyway, the “forgive them and do nothing” option is voted down, and a smaller group of women are appointed to decide between staying to fight or leaving. Polley has assembled an impressive cast, committed to their parts, without makeup or glamour—just these plain solid religious women. Among them are Claire Foy, whose character is fiercely angry and committed to punishing these men. Another one played by Jessie Buckley lashes out at the others, guilty that she kept allowing her abusive husband to harm her and her daughter. Rooney Mara plays Ona, whose gentle nature allows her to calm and contain the women’s conflicting emotions. Ben Whishaw is a young teacher who believes in the women and takes the minutes of their meetings, because, we find out, they’ve never been taught how to read and write. The older women, including those played by Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy, add a sense of gravity and experience to the mix.

What a remarkable movie this is! The main character is really the community. Painful but important insights about spirituality, abuse, forgiveness, and the claiming of their power by women, heretofore silenced, are dramatized with great beauty and force. Polley’s narrative technique, and the music and cinematography, lend the picture a touching kind of majesty. Women Talking is that rare thing, a true film of ideas.

Every year it’s my difficult task to list my favorite films of the past year. And I’m always late, because it takes a couple months for me to catch up. 2022 was a fantastic year for movies, although I still take note of them within the blurry outlines of the pandemic, going back a couple of years. If we must have a theme, for me it’s surviving and emerging from the past into new awareness.

Aftersun (Charlotte Welles). My favorite film of the year, the feature debut of Scottish writer and director Charlotte Welles, is about an eleven-year-old girl staying for the summer with her divorced dad at a seaside resort. Wells captures a certain time of childhood, when Sophie, played by Frankie Corio, is discovering her own independent thoughts and feelings about life, while learning from and enjoying the presence of her father Calum, played by Paul Mescal, whom she doesn’t get to see much during the year. He is a loving father who pays close attention to what his daughter has to say, and respects her, even though we notice concealed tensions connected to his estrangement from Sophie’s mother. Welles lets us simply observe the interactions of these two, being especially sensitive to the moods and desires of her young heroine. I can’t recall another film that so vividly portrays the real love of a child for a parent. The film keeps hitting the sweet spot of reverie, exploration, and understanding, displaying a level of visual skill and emotional honesty that is astonishing from a new talent. It takes us on a heart-centered journey that is never cloying, but increasingly beautiful and moving, especially after we realize that what we’re seeing is memory of Sophie years later when she’s an adult. Aftersun is the kind of movie people sometimes call “modest,” yet the impact is great.

Eo (Jerzy Skolimowski). This profound film looks at life from the innocent eyes of its non-human protagonist, a donkey, whose journey from one owner to the next reveals not only the broad spectrum of human yearning and suffering, but an imagined perspective in which the travails of an animal transcend all the drama we may choose to create about ourselves. Skolimowski attempts to create an existential bridge between our human experience and that of an animal by developing a tragic and transcendent vision. Eo, whose name is the sound he makes, is all of us in a sense, yet has a real life and experience beyond us.

Vortex (Gaspar Noé). Vortex presented one of the most unexpected revelations of the year for me. In Paris, a married couple has difficulty navigating the challenges of old age, especially the wife, played indelibly by Françoise Lebrun, who is slipping into dementia. The subject matter might seem familiar, but the treatment is something completely new. Noé divides the screen in half, left and right. One camera follows the husband, the other the wife, bringing home how we are in a sense always alone even when together. I found the emotions and insights we experience in Vortex, through means of this technique, tremendously meaningful.

Benediction (Terence Davies). We observe the great World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, as a young man turning against war and as an older man looking back on his life with regret. The depiction of the gay London art scene in the 1920s is invaluable, but the power of Benediction is fully revealed by Davies’ vision of lost love, and its echo through the entire course of a man’s life.

Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma). Simplicity is a rare artistic virtue that Sciamma employs with seemingly effortless skill. A little girl sees her mother mourning the death of her grandmother, but wants to know more. The film’s fairy tale structure shows the girl getting to actually meet her mother when she was a girl. A blissfully moving experience.

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh). McDonagh returns to the world of his plays in this extremely well-written portrait of shared madness on an island off the Irish coast a hundred years ago. One man (Brendan Gleeson) decides to suddenly end his friendship with another (Colin Farrell, in a career performance), and the sharply observant humor gradually turns to tragedy.

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese). In Lesotho, an 80-year old woman (Mary Twala Mhlongo) has buried the last surviving member of her family, her son. Now she just wants to die, but the news that the village’s ancestral graveyard will be flooded because of a new dam awakens her defiant spirit. The film’s brutal honesty is conveyed in a unique style reflecting mythical storytelling traditions.

White Noise (Noah Baumbach). Baumbach’s decision to direct someone else’s material for a change—Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel of the same name—has pushed his art to a higher level. This is a darkly hilarious satire of cultural turmoil in which a college professor (Adam Driver) and his family are caught up in a toxic train derailment (sound familiar?) that exposes the folly and fragility of American life.

Quo Vadis, Aida? (Jasmila Žbanić) The terror of being at the mercy of one’s worst enemies is portrayed with harrowing veracity in this story of a Bosnian translator (Jasna Đuričić) trying to hide her husband and sons from the Serbians, who have surrounded the city of Srebrenica during the brutal 1992-95 war. The atmosphere of crime that surrounds war is so graphically conveyed that it shook me.

Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (Alejandro G. Iñárritu). Iñárritu turns his gaze inward in this story of a Mexican filmmaker (Daniel Giménez-Cacho) returning home from success in the U.S., and trying to deal with his contradictions. The film takes an epic form: a concatenation of family drama, dreams, and wild imaginings. The artist confronts and celebrates every part of his being until encountering a final challenge.

Want more? Here are ten excellent B-sides:

Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook). The Good Boss (Fernando León de Aranoa). Hold Me Tight (Mathieu Amalric). Paris Calligrammes (Ulrike Ottinger) Tár (Todd Field) Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude) Navalny (Daniel Roher) Huesera: The Bone Woman (Michelle Garza Cervera) Gunda (Viktor Kossakovsky) The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes)

And a happy 2023 to all cinephiles!

Alejandro G. Iñárritu doesn’t do anything by half measures. After conquering Hollywood and coming away with two Oscars, he has now made a film closer to his heart, an introspective portrait of the artist’s world, private and public, and about his home, Mexico. But because it’s Iñárritu, it’s also an epic.

Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths takes autobiography as a starting point, not a goal. Let’s see what sounds familiar: journalist and documentary filmmaker Silverio Gama (played by the mesmerizing Daniel Giménez-Cacho) has returned to Mexico after fifteen years living in the L.A. area. His work is admired in his homeland, but there is some ambivalence towards him because he left the country to find a wider stage for his work. These are definite parallels with Iñárritu himself, and he has that experience to draw from, yet Silverio is not exactly him—the character being a journalist makes his point of view more directly critical towards the society of which he is a part.

He has a family: a brilliant wife, a young adult daughter, and a teenage son. They adore him and at the same time they are exhausted by him, his arrogance and charisma, his constant attempts to control. He is about to receive an American award for life achievement in documentary. This prize, awarded to a Latin American for the first time, makes his family and friends, and Mexico in general, proud, but also evokes the split identity of an artist who has gained success in the United States while always aware of the history and power disparity between that country and Mexico. This wound becomes deeper as the film proceeds: Silverio casts a cold judgmental eye on the crimes and massacres that have marked Mexico’s history.

I’ve presented the basic outline of the film as if it were a straightforward narrative, but that’s not what the experience of watching it is like at all. We start without the barest notion of what’s going on, scenes in which our point of view character appears to be caught in some bizarre dream. What is actual and what is imagined? First we see impossible, disturbing and surreal events. Later the symbolism falls away and we gradually discover the personal facts, some traumatic, which the symbols disguise and reveal. But from scene to scene, we can slip back into a kind of dream state, or a midpoint between waking and sleeping, while the film also evokes the universe of ideas that this proud, humorous, mystified intellectual grapples with every day in a parallel action to the ordinary details of his life.

One of the picture’s wry jokes is when someone criticizes Silverio’s films as habitually oneiric instead of relying on discernible facts as a documentary should. Of course, the film we’re watching is doing exactly that. But Iñárritu, who co-wrote the picture with his long-time screenwriter Nicolás Giacobone, is past taking a detached ironic view of things—Silverio goes through a cavalcade of extreme situations and states: laughter, rage, grief, celebration, fatalism, playfulness, arousal, bitterness, and, increasingly—horror. The film seeks to scale the heights and plumb the depths of a man’s psyche.

Bardo is a Tibetan word meaning a state between life and death. The entire story takes place in a bardo. Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths goes as far as it possibly can, or so it seems, until finally it crosses a boundary and goes even further.

A documentary about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre not only explains the full story of the shameful attack on the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa that destroyed a prosperous Black community, but details the complex and inspiring history of African Americans in Oklahoma.

In 2021, when for some time we’d been in the habit, as a culture, of looking back at historical milestones, a major event from 100 years earlier was publicly recalled and commented upon—an event that did not appear in the textbooks from which most white Americans were taught American history—the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. A large Black neighborhood known as the Greenwood District, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which had become a significant example of African American culture and prosperity nicknamed “Black Wall Street,” was attacked for two days by white residents of Tulsa, who burned down 35 city blocks of homes, businesses, and churches; killed hundreds of people, and displaced thousands more. But like so many crimes committed against Black Americans in the years after the Civil War, it was covered up and the victims were blamed as the instigators. But at the dawn of our current century, Tulsa began to make an effort to end the silence and cover-up, and establish the historical facts. There have been several good books and documentaries about this, and on the 100-year-anniversary came a film produced by LeBron James and Maverick Carter, and directed by Salima Koroma, called Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street.

Many facts that were new to me are brought forth by Black Tulsans who have spent years studying their own history. For instance, some of the Native Americans of the southeastern states were slave owners. When they were forced to leave their homes and migrate to the Indian Territory, which was what it was called before it became Oklahoma, their slaves came with them. Upon emancipation, these became freedmen, and they were granted parcels of Oklahoma land, some of which turned out to be oil-rich. Over time and after statehood, white settlers became the majority, but there was still a core of middle-class African Americans, including many who came from the former Confederacy to start a new life, concentrated in the Greenwood District of Tulsa. The average Black citizen was poorer than the average white, but still there was a greater freedom and autonomy in Greenwood than anywhere outside of Harlem. I was delighted by Koroma’s use of period art, animation, and archival footage to create a picture of Greenwood’s vibrant, bustling public life.

Carefully the film documents the steady pressure from white officials and businessmen to do something about this Black enclave in their midst. Of course they wanted the land, but racism also involved being offended that inferior people should do well. The usual kind of excuse—a young black man touching a white woman—set the conspirators off on their attacks. Complicit in the violence was the white-owned Tulsa Tribune, whose bigoted rhetoric is exposed in the film. To give only one example of the outrageous nature of all this, a group of private planes flew over, shooting guns and dropping bombs on the neighborhood. The film also covers the modern search for mass graves, which were finally found in 2020.

The title Dreamland is from the name of the local movie theater in Greenwood, destroyed by the mob. It also reminds us that there was a dream in which Black Americans were free to live as they chose, a dream shattered by the massacre, but still alive today. Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street is essential viewing for all Americans.

Satire is hard to do well. But Swedish director Ruben Östlund has proven to be a deft practitioner of the satiric art. His breakthrough fifth feature, 2014’s Force Majeure, poked fun at modern middle class illusions concerning masculinity and the family. The Square, from 2017, took aim at modern art and its uncomfortable relationship to politics. Now he’s broadened his range to satirize the ruling class itself, the wealthy elites that are ostensibly in charge of our world, in his latest film, Triangle of Sadness. The film begins with two beautiful people, a fashion model couple, Carl and Yaya, played by Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean. Now, the movie’s silly title comes from a throwaway comment made to Carl when he’s auditioning for a modeling gig: “Can you do something about that triangle of sadness between your eyebrows?” referring to the tight skin in that area resulting from certain kinds of plastic surgery. The film’s first part concerns the tense relationship between these two. Carl gets upset when Yaya clearly expects him to pay the tab for an expensive dinner when she had previously offered to pay. The bruised feelings around money reflect one of the movie’s overall themes: the way money determines behavior within an affluent society that is based on prestige and power over others.

The movie’s second part plunges us, as it were, into Östlund’s main comic set piece. Yaya is an online influencer as well as a model, and this results in her being gifted with two free tickets on a Mediterranean luxury cruise with an assortment of super-rich passengers. The wealthy people are profoundly self-centered, and we see the yacht staff being instructed how to avoid ever saying “No” to their requests or demands, a detail which becomes very instructive. The captain, who has apparently locked himself in his cabin on a massive bender, and who has to be cajoled to come meet his passengers at dinner, is played with infectious glee by Woody Harrelson. The ship eventually runs into a violent storm that causes an outbreak of seasickness among the passengers. Now I must caution you that there is a long sequence of explicit vomiting, almost as if to satisfy our frustrated wish for justice. I laughed uproariously, but if puking is hard for you to watch, I am giving you advance notice.

About halfway through the picture, it dawned on me that the film’s central metaphor is almost absurdly obvious. The luxury yacht represents the world economy, and if you think that’s too “on the nose,” I imagine that Östlund considered this also, but then—given the perilous state of things in our time, decided “So what? Let’s be obvious.” The fact that the ship’s captain is a drunken American, albeit one that’s given to flirting with Marxist rhetoric while sparring with one of the more smug millionaires on board, is only one of many wonderfully crazy details that gets filled in as we go along.

In Part Three of the film, however, we go beyond this level of parody, this jeering at the spectacle of the 1%. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that we are confronted with the much deeper issue of how power over other people ends up distorting our conscience, reason, and well-being, no matter what social class we may belong to. Some have bristled at Östlund’s satiric methods, but I think that Triangle of Sadness has a powerful unspoken premise—that our world is in the middle of an emergency, and that perhaps we need a shocking dose of laughter just to wake us up.

For those who might not appreciate nuance, The Whale could seem like a misleading title. Charlie, the main character played by Brendan Fraser, is a morbidly obese English teacher living in a small house in Idaho, confined both by his enormous size and his deteriorating health. His friend and nurse, Liz, has told him that he has congestive heart failure and maybe only a few days to live. But he refuses to go to a hospital.

The Whale does not refer to Charlie, but to Moby Dick, and specifically an essay about that novel that he has come to treasure. But the writer, Samuel D. Hunter, also wants us to associate this title with Charlie because one of the movie’s themes is the vicious and punishing attitudes that we see expressed towards people that are fat. And by this implication, the audience is challenged to see through those attitudes. Charlie teaches essay writing to freshman college students online, and we see him on Zoom encouraging them to be honest and original in their essays rather than trying to imitate or follow a formula. But he doesn’t turn on his own camera on Zoom, claiming that it’s broken. Charlie doesn’t want them to see what he look likes and how he’s living.

A young Christian man who comes to his door to proselytize is from the same evangelical organization that Charlie’s partner Alan had been a part of, and gradually we learn that Alan had died in some mysterious fashion because the church had expelled him. This is another important theme: Charlie, you see, is gay, and as the young missionary becomes a major character in the story, the film draws a crucial connection between religious fundamentalism and homophobia.

Watching The Whale, I could tell almost right away from the film’s structure that it must have originally been a play. All the action occurring in one place, five basic characters, a limited time span, the nature of the dialogue, all were clues as to this origin, and sure enough—in the end credits we find that Hunter’s script was adapted from his own play of the same name. The movie has some of the familiar limitations of filmed plays: schematic, implausible at times, speechifying, the sense that the action is carefully calculated. However, the director is Darren Aronofsky, who excels at amplifying extreme emotional states and taking us to the darkest depths of a person’s soul. In this case, we explore the depths of a man’s guilt, and luckily that man is played by Brendan Fraser, with a powerful and disturbing performance. He is the movie, essentially, and all the little flaws that you might notice in the story are as nothing in the aura of his presence.

Most troubling are the scenes where Charlie tries to navigate his little house in his ruinous state of health, and especially those where we witness his terrible eating disorder, the despair and trauma he experiences expressed through self-punishing bouts of gluttony. Hunter, and Aronofsky, want us to stop looking down on such a man and instead allow the awareness of his suffering to enter our hearts.

We eventually come to the center of Charlie’s drama—his urgent need to connect with his angry teenage daughter Ellie, played by Sadie Sink. She treats him with hatred and contempt, and yet he persists. All the strands of the story unite in a tension that starts to seem unbearable, and at the very height of that pressure, the film hits you in the gut. You can’t help but feel it. The Whale is a nightmare, a tragedy, and an incredible catharsis.

Once in awhile I get asked what are my favorite films, or my top ten greatest movies, and so forth. My lists have changed over time, but there are certain films that have always been on it. One of these has an unusual title, and I often get puzzled looks because people aren’t familiar with it. From Germany in 1931, directed by Fritz Lang, its title consists of just one letter: M.

Lang had become the most prominent German film director of the silent era, specializing in films of crime and suspense, but most famous today for his 1927 epic science fiction film Metropolis. With the coming of sound, Lang dived right in with this, his first talkie, and it proved to be a sensation.

M stands for murder. Someone is killing little girls. Lang doesn’t show any of these murders, but the way he tells the story is chilling. We hear the killer whistling the Hall of the Mountain King theme from Grieg’s Peer Gynt but we can’t see his face clearly. In one scene, a child carrying a balloon looks up at a stranger in the street. We cut to the worried mother at her home waiting for the girl to return. Then we cut to a shot of the balloon floating along until it gets caught in telephone wires. The horror is conveyed indirectly, but unmistakably.

Lang seems completely at ease in the sound format. There is no musical score, but the dialogue, sound effects and design are brilliantly realized. The movie gradually expands and becomes more and more complex. The public are panicking, and the police respond by raiding every outlaw hideout they know of, and arresting people right and left in hope of flushing out the murderer. Eventually, the city’s criminal underworld gets fed up with all this. These killings are bad for business. Since the cops aren’t having any luck solving the case, the crooks—including burglars, extortionists, safe crackers, and pickpockets—decide to pull together and somehow catch the culprit themselves. What follows is an impeccable, intricate, and exciting series of episodes in which the criminals use their own extensive knowledge and contacts in the underworld in order to discover who the murderer is, capture him, and then put him on trial in their own makeshift court.

All the while, Lang is implying a kind of equivalence between the cops and the crooks. In case you haven’t got it yet, in one shot, the chief of thieves begins to make a gesture, and then Lang cuts to the chief of police completing the same gesture. This is a society on the brink of collapse into utter corruption, and the story of the child killer is in a way just a symbol of that deeper social malaise.

It’s not spoiling anything to tell you that the murderer gets caught, although I won’t reveal what happens next. The actor playing him is Peter Lorre. This is Peter Lorre before anyone had ever heard of him. He only had a couple of bit parts before this. And it will give you an idea of how great he is in M that he became instantly famous because of this film. Of course he went to America eventually, and became a fixture in Hollywood.

The sensational nature of this story made it controversial. It was censored in some places. Newspaper stories about the film claimed that the title was Murderers Are Among Us. The Nazi Party, not yet in power but influential, protested screenings of the film. You see, they just assumed that Lang was talking about them.

M is more than just a crime film. It truly dares to explore the darkest, most taboo realms of the soul. And its vision of a society in which police and criminal merge into one was profound, and prophetic.

Martin McDonagh made his name as a playwright, with dramas set largely in rural west Ireland and featuring his own special brand of dark humor. The isolation and peculiar habits of his characters throw light on the conflicts and absurdities that motivate people to do crazy and destructive things. In the 2000s he started directing movies, and now his latest film returns to Ireland, powerfully reigniting the creative spark of his earlier plays. It’s called The Banshees of Inisherin.

Colin Farrell plays Pádraic, a small farmer on the fictional island of Inisherin, off the coast of County Galway in Ireland. The story, which takes places a hundred years ago, begins with him knocking on the door of his best friend Colm’s house to go to the pub together as they always do in the evening. But Colm, played by Brendan Gleeson, doesn’t answer. Pádraic can see him through the window, practicing on his fiddle, but banging on the window and speaking to him elicits no response. For some reason Colm is deliberately ignoring him.

As time goes on, and the silence continues, Pádraic demands to know why he is being treated this way. The blunt answer is rather shocking: Colm wants to spend more time composing music and developing his craft as a musician, and he thinks he’s been wasting his time talking and drinking with Pádraic instead. He says that Pádraic is a dull person whom he doesn’t like anymore.

This is a simple yet very unusual premise for a film. Pádraic doesn’t know how to deal with the rejection—it’s a small island, and losing his best friend confronts him with a loneliness he can’t accept. He refuses to take it as final, but continues to try to engage with Colm, even though Colm insists that he must stop talking to him. There’s a steadily escalating emotional pressure that begins with wry comedy and gradually becomes much more serious. We realize that although Pádraic can’t stop himself and is emotionally tone deaf, Colm himself is really rather disturbed. Almost accidentally, we also find out that in 1923 the bloody Irish civil war is going on. As a kind of echo of the personal turmoil on the island, the characters can sometimes hear gunfire on the shore, a deadly political turmoil in the distance.

Gleeson, with his burly presence and grumpy demeanor, is reliably intense as Colm, but the central focus is on Colin Farrell. I’ve seen him in lots of films over the years, and I’d say he has what you might call a movie star persona. But there’s none of that here. He plays a completely different kind of character than I’ve ever seen him do before, and it’s excellent. With a wide-eyed earnestness and vulnerable manner that reveals, against his will, a yearning insecurity, Pádraic is foolish, impulsive, yet unmistakably tender hearted. Farrell crafts this unusual man from the inside, and we see him to best effect in relationship to his sister Siobhán, played with passionate brilliance by Kerry Condon. She’s protective of her brother, but sees through the entire farce of this conflict, being really the one sane voice in the story.

McDonagh uses this small island setting, where there are only a few people to know, as a way of highlighting the volatile inner drama of how people relate to their neighbors, and their worries about what the neighbors think of them. Terrifically well written and beautifully shot, The Banshees of Inisherin pulls us in with delicious laughter, then catches us off guard with its melancholy vision of human stubbornness.

Ours is an age of migrants, those martyred by the legal fictions we call borders. Two recent films explore this persistent, troubling experience.

Flee is from a very small genre, that of an animated documentary for adults. It presents the true account of an Afghan man, named Amin for the purposes of the film, whose family escaped from their war-torn country in the 1990s, ending up in Russia, where discrimination and poverty followed them. Since they were officially stateless, getting out of Russia was extremely difficult. We are shown their bitter ordeals, including being returned to Russia after trying to make it by ship to Finland. Always present was the risk of violence and exploitation.

Amin finally made it to Denmark as an unaccompanied minor with refugee status. But in order to achieve that status, he had to make up a story about his whole family being murdered, and from then on he didn’t dare reveal the truth for fear of being sent back. After decades, and after coming to terms with being a gay man, he needed to tell the truth in order to live honestly with his partner, and reunite if possible with his family. A good friend, Jonas Poher Rasmussen, is the man he tells all of this, and Rasmussen is the director of this film.

The animation is stark and somewhat abstract, the better to portray the constant tension and loneliness of the desperate migrant. Oddly, making the film in animated form creates an emotional experience more vivid for us than it might have been as an ordinary documentary. Flee has a very affecting, visceral impact.

Identifying Features, the film debut of Mexican director Fernanda Valadez, explores another aspect of this experience: the migrants who disappear or die. In the first scene we see a young man, in fact a teenager, approaching as if in a dream or memory, the house of his mother, and telling her that he is going to cross the border with a friend, who has an uncle in the States who will get them work. But after two months, with no word from her son, the mother, Magdalena, played with sorrowful dignity by Mercedes Hernández, is deeply troubled.

The mother of the other boy is told that her son’s body has been found, and when she travels to the place housing remains of missing migrants, she’s unable to identify the body because it’s been burned beyond recognition. Magdalena then travels to the border, and the rest of the film, using haunting and poetic imagery, at times evoking spiritual symbolism, weaves a story of desperate hope. Along the way, we discover the perils of navigating a border crossing, beset with predators who kill and steal from the powerless, along with a sinister alliance between police, military, and the cartels. Halfway through, we meet another young man, Miguel, played by David Illescas, who has been detained trying to cross and is now deported back to Mexico, with nothing to show for his effort. Alone he travels to return to his family in his impoverished village, and along the way he encounters Magdalena. They help one another and together form a bond of grief. The film’s shattering finale asks the unanswerable: why do people become trapped in a cycle of violence and cruelty? Identifying Features refuses to look away from the horror and injustice that corrupts our future.

Both Flee and Identifying Features are available streaming and on DVD and Blu-ray.

Among the handful of older films that are generally considered classic Christmas movies, It’s a Wonderful Life is quite different. Yes, the last fourth or so of the movie takes place during Christmas, and there’s a Christmas tree and some Christmas music, but other than that, the holiday is not an explicit theme of the picture. Frank Capra’s 1946 film, expanded from a magazine short story with help from the great screenwriting duo Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, is actually an attempt to explore one of the most difficult themes in literature: that of the genuinely good man.

What is true goodness, and how does it fare in the world? The good man in It’s a Wonderful Life is George Bailey, who runs a building and loan company in a small town called Bedford Falls. Capra picked the perfect actor to play this character, James Stewart, who I think played good men more convincingly than anyone else ever has.

As the film begins, we find ourselves in the realm of myth. We see blinking stars and hear heavenly voice-overs. There’s a man, George Bailey—he needs help right away, and a guardian angel named Clarence is assigned to the job. He is shown George’s life in flashback, which is how we the audience see the story. From the first scene, where George rescues his brother from falling through the ice, while losing the hearing in one ear as a consequence, we see how George—who has normal human aspirations—ends up selflessly sacrificing his own chances and opportunities to help others. For him, it means staying in Bedford Falls instead of going to college or traveling. He marries his childhood sweetheart, played by Donna Reed, and has four kids. But the selfish actions of the town’s wealthiest man, the bank president, Mr. Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore, continues to create hardship for George and the town, which leads to ruin and despair. And here we get back to the mythical element: when George says it would have been better not to be born, Clarence decides to show him what the town would be like without him.

I used to make fun of this movie because of its sentimentality, and also, well, because of angels and the supernatural. But what I see now is a splendidly crafted parable about what really counts in life. Capra saw that America was in the process of changing in fundamental ways after World War II. The film idealizes pre-war America as a world of small town decency, community, and family. But what we see on the horizon is the profit motive as the dominant social principle. In the alternate life without George, Bedford Falls has become Pottersville, named after the film’s villain, Mr. Potter. It is a soulless, lonely place where people live in anguish and fear. The film has great nostalgia for the past, and anxiety for the future: Capra saw the postwar future as loud, crass, and heartless. George Bailey’s despair corresponds to a dark place in the American soul. Emotionally, it’s remarkable how dark, that is to say how honest, the film is about ordinary life. Well, audiences at the time didn’t want to look back—after a long and bitter war, they just wanted to be entertained, and It’s a Wonderful Life bombed at the box office. Its failure ended Capra’s independent movie company Liberty Films. Only years later did people start considering it a classic.

Maybe the Christmas connection is more significant than I thought. Which is a better life, that of selfless service and love, or of wealth and profit above all else? Just like Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol, Frank Capra’s answer was love, first and last and forever, and the one way to realize that It’s a Wonderful Life.

White Noise, the latest film from director Noah Baumbach, is so different than what we’re used to seeing, that I was delighted, and a little surprised, that the audience I saw it with was able to accept its surreal style and laugh at its offbeat humor. It’s a comedy about modern American life, which is about as general a description as you could get, but whereas we associate comedies normally with jokes, gags, and silliness, there’s hardly any of that here. The comedy is in the overall tone of the picture: the version of life that’s presented, reflecting the brilliant, peculiar world view of a single author.

Up until now, of all the theatrical features that Baumbach has directed in a career spanning over two decades, this is the first not based on a story by him. White Noise is adapted from the 1985 novel of that name by Don DeLillo, the book that made him famous, winning the National Book Award. DeLillo’s fiction, his dark, widely ranging satiric style, examining the different kinds of madness and catastrophe we see in American society, is so distinctive, that I think adapting it helped channel Baumbach’s energy in a direction that represents a new artistic advance for him.

Adam Driver, plays Jack Gladney, a professor at a Midwestern college who helped found “Hitler studies.” For someone whose subject involves great political upheaval, he seems a mild-mannered guy. On the outside, his life is close to perfect: he has a beautiful wife named Babette, played by Greta Gerwig, and four children, three from their previous marriages, and one from their own. The kids are all hyper-aware and intellectually curious, in general more in touch with what’s going on than their parents. Baumbach has retained the time period of the book, so we’re in the 1980s, with no cell phones and no internet. And this vantage point of the past, even though it was the present when DeLillo wrote the book, turns out to be amazingly predictive of problems and concerns that we’re facing now.

First we enter a free-wheeling satiric depiction of academic life, with the usual petty conflicts, and here we are gifted with an outstanding, hilarious performance by Don Cheadle as a professor of Elvis Presley studies. Now be prepared: none of the dialogue in this film is naturalistic. People are always making statements about life and society in a deadpan, almost abstract manner that mixes the most profound thoughts with absolutely trivial attention to detail. There are always surprising bits of chatter and turns of phrase that paint the story with a tinge of folly. There’s no topic: marriage, sex, politics, religion, that escapes untouched.

Eventually there’s a plot development involving a train accident in which a huge cloud of toxic fumes escapes into the atmosphere. Existential dread enters the picture, and permeates the rest of the film, even as we keep laughing, for instance at Jack’s constant need to downplay, to a ridiculous level, the danger that threatens them, in the face of the obvious panic of his wife and kids. The misinformation around this toxic event may remind you, painfully, of what we’ve seen in the current Covid-19 pandemic. Eventually we get into a “family running for their lives” disaster film scenario, but reduced to the funniest and most outlandish extremes.

Baumbach’s visual texture is intense and colorful. There’s so much going on that you might get a little dizzy. But for me, White Noise was an invigorating comic experience, hitting that rare sweet spot between profundity and the absurd.

María Candelaria, a 1943 film by Emilio Fernandez, is a prime example from what is considered the “golden age” of Mexican cinema. The title character, María (played by Dolores del Rio), a young Indian peasant living in the river country of Xochimilco, has been ostracized by her village because of a scandal involving her deceased mother. She is loved by Lorenzo (played by Pedro Armendáriz), who hopes to marry her when they can get enough money, but they are in debt to a corrupt landowner who wants María for himself, and so tries to destroy them out of jealousy. Meanwhile an artist (Alberto Galan) from a nearby town who wishes to paint the beautiful María, tries to help the couple get out of danger.

The plot elements are pure melodrama, but the treatment raises the story to another level. The heroine represents a spirit of independence, freedom, and a love that is not cowed by custom or tradition. The villagers use ideas of honor and virtue to justify their own envy and hatred, and the film condemns hypocrisy in sexual matters as well, which was rather advanced for its time. Fernández and his co-screenwriter, Mauricio Magdaleno, cleverly wrap their social consciousness in the conventions of popular fiction—we instinctively identify with the downtrodden María and recognize the morality of the villagers as false. They also set up a dichotomy between the light-skinned ruling class and the Indian peasants, which must have struck a chord with Mexican audiences. The film was a major success at home, and won the top prize at Cannes, the first Latin American film to do so, and this helped foster a boom in Mexican cinema during the late 1940s.

Del Rio had been a Hollywood star for years—here she looks at least a decade younger than her actual age of 38. The part calls for sensitivity and nobility, and she comes through with flying colors. The acting in general is quite good, but the real reasons the film works as well as it does are Fernández’s fluid style and the photography of Gabriel Figueroa. The budget was miniscule by American standards, but Figueroa’s luminous black-and-white images lend the film a haunting, almost mythic grandeur. The camera movement has a calm, graceful rhythm. Fernandez also uses some striking point-of-view shots, as in a scene where we see Lorenzo from below as he rows down the river while María lies in the boat looking up at him. María Candelaria portrays the struggles and tragedies of the poor in a way that is affecting without becoming maudlin. The ending finally achieves something close to poetry.

The painful struggles between parents and children are often a subject of drama, and no surprise, given the plentiful examples of this theme in human experience. What is rare and more difficult is the depiction of a strong emotional bond between a kid and a parent, and in the case of children, a love for one’s mother and father that goes beyond words, a kind of environment in the child’s mind that permeates life and leaves a lasting effect on the memory. Too often the artist, in a play or film, settles for a forced sense of sweetness, a sentimental, albeit often humorous, perspective on the young experience and point of view. Aftersun, the debut feature from Scottish writer and director Charlotte Wells, is that “one in a thousand” film that captures the essence of a fleeting time with devastating intensity and truth.

Sophie is an 11-year-old girl on a summer holiday with her divorced dad at a less than luxurious seaside resort in Turkey. To sum up the plot, the story of what happens, is pretty much exactly what I just said. There is really no story in the usual sense—the big events happen within the characters, and especially within Sophie, played by a luminous young newcomer named Frankie Corio. The film is more like a poem, and a very beautiful one. The one-word title Aftersun, sounds enigmatic like a poem—in fact, it’s a lotion that’s applied to cool off the skin after exposure to the sun. But even this mundane detail can double as metaphor.

Sophie loves her father Calum, played by Paul Mescal, and we soon realize that he’s quite remarkable in his way, a man in his 30’s who listens with steady attention to Sophie and treats her with tenderness and consideration. But of course we the audience can also see that he’s an ordinary man with flaws, and with a life largely unknown to her, who lives near London with her mother the rest of the year and doesn’t get to see him much.

Through various hints—music and other references—we gradually realize that this is happening in the 1990s, and we’re seeing all this as a memory of the adult Sophie today. This layer of memory, like the cooling aftersun of the title, evokes poignant feelings, a steady light of emotion in the heart of the future self looking on the experience through the eyes of the past self, so fleeting and so precious. Wells already shows a mastery of style that can visually explore the dawning awareness of this young girl’s own mind and feelings, relentlessly expanding with image and sound the richness of an inner life which sees everything in this world as if brand new.

There’s much Wells has decided not to tell us. Why did Sophie’s mother leave her father? Why Turkey, why are they vacationing there? What is the meaning of the father’s melancholy, the shadows that so often stay hidden? These are all meant to be just hints, rather than plot points, hints like the incomplete knowledge kids have of the adult world, a world that Sophie is very curious about, and yet cautious of. And I kept expecting some tragic event to happen in the film, which never did, because the only tragedy here is the transience of beauty and love.

It amazes me, I marvel at how once in a great while, a movie will come out of nowhere—filmmakers and actors with which I’m not familiar—and then when I just happen to see it, absolutely destroys me. I’m sure in some way it touches my own memories with my father, now departed, in that bittersweet way we can’t always express. All I really know is that the devastating artistry of Aftersun shot me right through the heart.

It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been doing this show for 17 years, and yet I haven’t talked about one of my favorite movies, The Big Sleep, until now. I’m referring to the 1946 Howard Hawks film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The Big Sleep was originally a crime novel by Raymond Chandler, featuring Chandler’s recurring hard-boiled detective character Philip Marlowe. Bogart plays Marlowe. He also played Dashiell Hammett’s detective Sam Spade five years earlier in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, making him the only actor to have played both these iconic characters. Actually he was always playing the most entertaining character of all, Humphrey Bogart. But I digress.

Marlowe gets hired by an old man, General Sternwood, who has received threatening letters concerning the payment of his youngest daughter’s gambling debts. The assignment is to find out what kind of trouble the daughter, named Carmen, is actually in, and help her out of it, if possible. What he soon finds is the blackmailer’s dead body, in a gangster’s deserted house, with a drugged Carmen there as, apparently, the fall girl. She is a wild seductive young socialite, played with sleazy zest by the 20-year-old Martha Vickers.

Back at the Sternwood’s, Marlowe encounters Carmen’s older sister, Vivian, played by Lauren Bacall, who doesn’t seem very happy to meet him, and as it turns out has her own secrets to protect. Marlowe’s relationship with Vivian becomes both romantic and dangerous.

To try to follow the plot any further would involve a dizzying array of killers, gamblers, kidnappers, cops, and blackmailers. Bogart strides through this incredibly complicated story with complete disregard for niceties and a humorous quip for every occasion. The film is often quite funny. Ultimately, though, the title The Big Sleep refers to death, and Marlowe’s smart aleck tough guy is surrounded by darkness and menace at all times. The constant sense of danger heightens the movie’s excitement, while the main character’s brass-knuckled self assurance puts a smile on our face. A lot of people call it film noir, and I suppose it is, but it’s directed by Howard Hawks, and that means, before anything else, that it’s fun.

Many critics and viewers complain that the plot is impossible to understand. Supposedly even the screenwriters—one of whom was William Faulkner—had some trouble figuring out exactly who killed whom. But the truth is, the picture was first shot in 1945, and that version, which some DVD or Blu Ray editions include as an extra, was understandable, although admittedly complicated. But the producers didn’t think that it was enough. Bogie and Bacall were an item at this point, and they wanted the romance between those two highlighted. So Hawks cut out a few scenes, and parts of scenes here and there, inserted new scenes of the two main characters doing witty repartee and double entendre, and redid the ending emphasizing Bacall more, and it all worked. The chemistry between Bogie and Bacall really improved the movie’s snap. The only trouble is, the stuff that was cut out explained quite a few things in the plot that now seem sketchy in the final version. But… none of this ever harmed my enjoyment of the film, which is really about the energy and dark intrigue, plus brilliant dialogue and of course Bogart’s dynamic performance. I’ve watched The Big Sleep again and again for years, and I’m not tired of it yet.

A homicide detective becomes romantically obsessed with a woman suspected of killing her husband, in this stylish mystery from Park Chan-wook.

The cinematic world is abuzz with praise for the latest film from Korean director Park Chan-wook entitled Decision to Leave. Park is already well known for his daring movies treating themes of horror and violence, most famously The Handmaiden, and Oldboy. As it happens, Decision to Leave is something of a departure for him, a stylish murder mystery and intense romantic suspense film. Although the new picture has relatively less violence or horror, Park’s love of provocative experimentation remains.

The story concerns a homicide detective from Busan named Jang Hae-joon, and played by the very skillful Park Hae-il. He’s a dogged investigator in his 40s, with a lovely wife that lives in another town and whom he only sees on weekends. Currently assigned to a sensational murder case, he is called one night to what looks like a bad accident—a climber has fallen off a steep cliff to his death. But the dead man, an immigration officer, has DNA traces under his fingernails, which match the DNA of his wife, Song Seo-rae. Suspicion falls on her because she shows no surprise or sorrow when told of her husband’s death. Medical records, however, show that she had been physically abused many times by her husband, who beat her and scratched her, which would explain the DNA under the fingernails. So the evidence begins to point to suicide rather than foul play. But this mysterious woman, Seo-rae, begins to evoke an attraction in the cop investigating her. She’s Chinese, and her difficulty speaking Korean somehow adds to her strange charm. Seemingly against his will, Jang becomes gradually more obsessed with her, to the point that it becomes noticeable to his colleagues, who complain that he’s neglecting the high-profile murder case of which he’s in charge.

Park’s sense of screen composition is so smooth and assured that Decision to Leave can’t help but remind me of great Hollywood films from the classic era, and specifically of Alfred Hitchcock. The idea of a man’s overpowering obsession with an unknowable love object is of course paralleled in Hitchcock’s great 1958 film Vertigo. But this movie has a different emphasis and a more modernist technique. When the film reveals something from the past, instead of clearly demarcating the different time frames in some way, Park cuts suddenly to a similar shot and point of view, when we suddenly realize we’re in the past, without a transition. This creates a fluid subjective quality—we’re inside Jang’s head, where his experience and memory become interchangeable. And the film does the same thing with space as with time. At one point, Jang is doing surveillance of Seo-rae with binoculars, in his car outside her building. But then, as she picks up the telephone, he is suddenly in the room gazing at her, sniffing the air, and then she looks straight out the window, startling him, and all this time he is still in the car. The multilayered visual style depicts almost tangibly the progression of Jang’s mad love for this woman, who remains a suspect.

I don’t think this would work so well if Park hadn’t chosen the perfect person to play Seo-rae, the subtly beautiful Chinese actress Tang Wei. Tang doesn’t play a seductress here. On the contrary, her seriousness and the ambiguity of her facial expressions convey the idea that this is someone who is wholly her own person, and someone you want to believe.

The murder mystery is complicated, and the viewer must pay close attention to follow it. But the real story here is the emotional journey of a man desperately and dangerously in love. Decision to Leave is a glittering jewel of a film.

The endlessly cyclical nature of life is depicted as four different stories in a sleepy Italian village.

Le Quattro Volte, a film from 2010 by Michelangelo Frammertino, is like a vision of an ancient world, although the story takes place in our century. I call it a story, but it has more of the quality of myth.

The slow rhythm of daily life for an old goat herder in Calabria is conveyed superbly and with precise meditative attention. It’s a life of routine, which the old man, who is in bad health, endures without regret. Calabria is the poorest region in Italy, the part in the south that looks like the toe of a boot on the map—rugged hilly, and mountainous. The goat herder’s village in the film is perched on top of a hill, with rustic architecture that looks like we’re still in the Middle Ages. The goats are in a pen at the town limits, as the road out snakes downward. Every day he walks steadily to the pen, rouses the herd, and then leads them out and into the surrounding hills and meadows. While they feed on grass and other plants, he sits quietly, sometimes dozing off. With him is a shepherd dog, a border collie, who knows exactly how to lead the goats where the herder wants them. As the film immerses us in the steady, repetitive life in this rural area, we notice the unspoken bond between the man and the dog, and in fact with the goats as well. All is expressed more in grunts and sighs than in words. I tried to find the subtitle function on the Blu Ray I was watching, and I realized that there were no subtitles, because so very little is said during the movie that you don’t need them. Silence itself is almost a major character. Outside of the credits, there’s no musical score. Instead, the outstanding sound design presents all the little sounds of the country—the wind and the animals—in all the complexity they reveal in nature.

The title of the film, Le Quattro Volte, means The Four Times. Why is that? We start to find out when our attention leaves the goatherd and focuses on a little newborn goat. Now, the story, if we can call it that, is all about this one tiny being and his daily actions and struggles living in the herd. The gentle beauty we’ve experienced shows another side: the harsh necessities of survival, depicted in the most elemental and heart-rending way when the baby goat gets separated from the others and wanders about crying for help, finally resting, all tired out, beneath a tall tree. The tree is now the main character, and we are shown its life and presence, the waving of branches and rustling of leaves, and once again an eternal quiet at the heart of life. Suddenly it’s winter. Snow covers the ground. Men chop down the tree, and take it to town. Now it’s an inanimate object, and they use it as part of a holiday celebration. After that, it’s burned, turned into charcoal, and becomes part of a large kiln carefully built and operated by the villagers.

The four times are four lives: human, animal, vegetable, and mineral. The idea that the mineral also has a kind of life is part of an ancient world view in which everything, animate or not, is filled with spirit. Frammertino was inspired by the legend that the philosopher Pythagoras claimed to remember living four lives. The doctrine is called metempsychosis, but the movie isn’t teaching a doctrine—it’s just inspired by this idea of transmigrating souls to envision nature subjectively, as being a person, a goat, a tree, a piece of charcoal. The experience of watching Le Quattro Volte is like nothing else in cinema. It’s a film of spiritual sublimity.

Joanna Hogg continues her semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist, a young woman filmmaker in 1980s England exploring grief.

The Souvenir: Part II is the name of the latest film from English director Joanna Hogg. When you release a Part II, the assumption is that we first need to see Part I. With The Godfather: Part II, to give a famous example, it was a pretty safe assumption given how successful and widely seen the first film was. The Souvenir, however, released in 2019, is not in that category. Hogg’s insistence on calling this movie The Souvenir: Part II shows the supreme self-confidence that can often accompany brilliance. In any case, the two films do form a continuous whole, and would be best watched in order.

The Souvenir ended with a tragic event in the life of the main character, Julie, a young student director in 1980s England, played by Honor Swinton Byrne. Part II opens with her struggling with grief for her boyfriend Anthony, who was a brilliant, charismatic, yet rather mysterious person. Julie tries to find out all she can about him from his parents and anyone else who knew him, but there’s always something elusive about her search.

Her mother, Rosalind, is played by the actress’s actual mother, Tilda Swinton. One of the results of this fortunate bit of casting is that scenes between the two have a special intimacy that you can sense. The closeness goes along with a gap in understanding, though: Rosalind worries about Julie, but doesn’t see how her daughter’s unusual questions and struggles contribute to her development as an artist.

At film school, the panel overseeing her proposed graduate film has a negative reaction to the script she submits. In The Souvenir she was working on a film with a realist technique, about a boy and his mother in a poor neighborhood in a northern city. But this feature-length screenplay is a personal story using more symbolic methods, based on her own recent life, which we’ve seen play out in the first film. Despite this discouraging reaction, Julie is committed to the project. Now we watch as her search for answers is incorporated into the making of her graduate film.

Hogg portrays the process of low-budget filmmaking with a sharp eye, including the work’s essential tedium. A fellow student, a French woman named Garance, suggests to Julie a young actor of talent whom she knows to play the boyfriend role. Julie then surprises Garance by asking her to play the lead part, basically Julie’s character, even though this disappoints another friend who has long been a supporter and who expected a part. Here we see how the evolution of an artistic project tends not to take the path of least resistance, but results from having to grapple with the material and discover what it demands, even if that upends expectations. The film is essentially a portrait of the artist—the story has many autobiographical elements, yet I’m referring to the wider sense of the artist in general. The director wants us to experience the creative process from the inside through the techniques she uses in her film.

One of the crucial things conveyed is that there is always a great difference between the film in her head and the one she actually makes. When Julie’s picture—called The Souvenir, of course—is finally approved and screened, instead of being shown the end product, we enter Julie’s mind as a sort of luminous dream world where the characters and the symbols are charged with emotion and meaning, and the thoughts and impressions our main character has been working with throughout the film are embodied in visual terms.

The Souvenir: Part II confirms Joanna Hogg as one of the more stylistically advanced directors working in film today.

A portrait of a creative genius, a conductor and composer played by Cate Blanchett, explores the dark and unacknowledged heartlessness behind the vigor and prestige of a famous artist.

Tár is the name of a new film written and directed by Todd Field. The main character, Lydia Tár, is a prominent American classical music conductor and composer, played by Cate Blanchett. We meet her at the height of her career, after heading several world-class orchestras, now the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, arguably the most prestigious position in the symphonic world. The film opens with her being interviewed at a New York film festival, where the brilliance of her intellect shines freely, discussing conducting in general, and her upcoming recording of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Behind Tár’s smooth and articulate presentation, there is a hint of something else, and I think it’s deliberate: smug condescension. Perhaps the supreme self-confidence of such a person will inevitably cast this shadow.

Lydia is a fictional character, of course, but Field has created an extraordinary and multifaceted personality for Blanchett to bring to life. It’s all very well to indicate that your heroine is in fact a genius. It’s quite another to write a character who makes you really believe it. Lydia’s talk is so sophisticated that we can truly admire, while at the same smile a little at the ironic touches the director adds to the portrait, the will of steel underneath the suave exterior, the strongly held convictions that drive every aesthetic statement, every literary allusion. The film presents us with a convincingly brilliant artist. But of course the writing depends on the performer for its realization. Field had in mind Cate Blanchett, one of our best living film actors, from the beginning.

Lydia has an extremely busy and complicated life. On the personal side, she is openly lesbian, living with her partner Sharon, the orchestra’s head violinist, played by the great Nina Hoss, with whom she has adopted a girl. We see her as a teacher, outspoken and even ruthless in her attitude towards what she sees as the timidity of some of her students. We see her as the super-efficient manager of her own career, so competent and controlling that she intimidates even those who work closest with her. The extraordinary thing is that in the midst of all this, we are made to suspect intuitively that there is a kind of emptiness at work, a big impressive show without a center.

Todd Field knows that classical tragedy portrays the fatal defects of larger-than-life figures. His screenplay and direction achieve a novelistic density, so that when events start to go wrong, it’s not really about hubris, but about a host of uncomfortable questions concerning artists and the needs that drive artistic creation, about the self-seeking that dominates people, about passion and its discontents.

Lydia has apparently had a habit of picking out female musicians to fall in and out of love with, brief infatuations and affairs. One of these young women angered her when they broke up, and instead of letting the matter go, Lydia decided to make sure that this poor girl would be blacklisted from getting a job in any orchestra. This is the start of things unraveling, but there are depths and shadows here that are more significant than just this one transgression, and they are slowly revealed.

Blanchett appears in a lot of genre pieces, as any steadily working Hollywood actress has to do, but here once more she is given the chance at something great, and she takes it even further than we expect. The musical sequences are stunning. Tár is a film of lavish beauty and desolating insight.  

For many modern historians, the First World War, from 1914-18, has a special significance, as the point at which an older version of civilization fell apart. In British thought and memory it sometimes has the character of an unhealed wound. Almost 900 thousand young British soldiers died, about 6% of the adult male population. It was as if the flower of English youth had been cut off. In the writings of the poets who fought in that war we still read passionate urgency. Siegfried Sassoon was one of those poets. His father was of Iraqi Jewish descent, his mother a Christian. He was not of German ancestry; his mother chose the name Siegfried because of her love of the music of Richard Wagner.

English director Terence Davies has largely focused in his films on exploring and recovering personal and cultural legacies. In his latest film, Benediction, he tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, not in a straightforward or linear fashion, but as a weaving back and forth in time, a recapturing of Sassoon’s experience that takes into account his loves and strengths, but also his mistakes and failures.

Incredibly courageous, loved and trusted by the men who served with him, Sassoon, played beautifully as a young man by Jack Lowden, was decorated for bravery and recommended for the Victoria Cross. But when we meet him in the film, he’s caused a sensation by publishing an open letter, what he called “a soldier’s declaration,” denouncing the conduct of the war and saying he would no longer fight. Instead of being court-martialed he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. In an early scene, he argues with a close friend, the prominent critic Robbie Ross, played by Simon Russell Beale, because Ross had pulled some strings to prevent Sassoon possibly being shot. Sassoon wanted to put his life on the line to oppose the war, but Ross simply wanted his friend to survive. In the hospital, Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen, another poet, and the impact Owen has on his life, both as a poet and as a gay man, is decisive. Wilfred Owen went back to his unit after being pronounced cured by psychiatrists, and he died only a week before the Armistice.

The film covers Sassoon’s tumultuous life after the war, as a member of the London artistic scene in the 1920s, intercut with scenes of him as an older man, now played by Peter Capaldi, still bitter about the war and about his personal failures, and ultimately turning to the Catholic Church in search of some kind of meaning.

In the 1920s, gay life in the London art scene was barely closeted—it was quite evident to anyone who could see, yet no one talked about it publicly. Davies presents us with the sometimes very funny, but also painful, episodes of backbiting and cutting wit on the part of Sassoon and his lovers, including the musician and actor Ivor Novello, with a malicious personality, and the decadent aristocrat Stephen Tennant, self-centered to the point of abuse.

Terence Davies is openly gay himself, and here he succeeds in presenting an historical portrait of gay relationships in a specific English time and place, without holding back. Sassoon got married eventually and had a son, but in the scenes with him as an old man, we can sense that there’s still an emptiness inside that may never be filled. Why is that? At film’s end, in a sequence of almost unbearable poignance, we find out. I cried at the end of Benediction, a film in which personal and historical tragedy embrace.

The silent era in Europe is still a largely unexplored treasure house of film, and among the foremost nations in cinema was Sweden, where for a brief time innovations there rivaled those taking place in America. The brilliant young Mauritz Stiller brought sophistication and technical mastery to his movies, although today he’s better known, if at all, for having discovered Greta Garbo, with whom he went to Hollywood, ultimately failing to fit into the rigid hierarchy of the studio system and returning to Sweden, where he fell ill and died in 1928, at the much too early age of 45. Today I offer one of Stiller’s great Swedish films, from 1919, called Sir Arne’s Treasure.

Here’s the story: in 16th century Sweden, a rebellion of the King´s Scottish guards is put down. Three of the rebels make a daring escape from a prison tower, but on their way through the snow to a fishing village where they hope to find a ship, extreme cold and hunger drives them mad with desperation. When they come to the mansion of Sir Arne, a wealthy nobleman, they murder him and his family, steal the treasure, burn the castle down, and escape. But a girl named Elsalill (played by Mary Johnson) survives the carnage by hiding. Years later, adopted and living in a different town, Elsalill falls in love with the noble young lord Sir Archi, played by Richard Lund, unaware that he was one of the murderers.

Stiller was already a veteran director when he adapted this Selma Lagerlof story to the screen, and it is a masterful work, as advanced in technique as anything that had been seen at the time, albeit on a smaller scale than D.W. Griffith´s epics. He makes extensive use of the moving camera, which was rare, and his habit of cutting into the middle of an action creates an effect more modern than in most silent films. The scene in which neighbors rush to the burning castle brilliantly conveys chaos and terror. Over the entire film, in fact, there hangs a mood of ominous fatefulness and “the uncanny,” exemplified by marvelous sequences in which the young woman dreams of her dead sister. In addition, Stiller handles Elsalill´s love for the Scottish nobleman poignantly, yet with very little sentimentality. Unexpectedly, and quite movingly, these troubled characters do not behave as we would expect in a melodrama, but in a more convincing and ultimately more tragic manner.

Shot by Jules Jaenzon, Sweden´s preeminent cinematographer, Sir Arne´s Treasure is an uncommonly gorgeous motion picture. The ending scene with the procession across the ice is among the most haunting and beautiful in all of cinema. It’s both exciting and instructive to see how a pioneer could create fully realized visual poetry in those early days.

Sir Arne’s Treasure is available on DVD.

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. Like a myth or a folktale, the third feature film of Mosoto writer and director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese announces its meaning beforehand with its title. But woven into that one sentence—this is not a burial, it’s a resurrection—are many other complex meanings concerning death, grief, ignorance, oppression, truth, courage, and more.

In a rural village in Lesotho, a small country in southern Africa, an 80-year old woman named Mantoa laments the death of her only son. Over the years she has experienced the death of her parents, her husband, her daughter and grandchild. But after all this, her son was there to still anchor her to the world. Now he is gone too. Eventually we piece together that he died in a mining accident, but we don’t know the full story behind any of these losses, only that Mantoa has survived her entire family. Now she no longer finds meaning in life.

Mantoa is played by an awe-inspiring veteran actress from South Africa, Mary Twala Mhlongo. She portrays overpowering grief with an intensity and conviction that is uncanny. And this was her final performance—Mary Twala died in 2020.

So…all Mantoa wants is to die and be buried in the graveyard with her family and the village ancestors. She assumes a grim silence, impervious to all efforts by the villagers to interact. The priest sits outside her door and tries to talk to her. He tells her about the death of his wife, and his long struggle to get through the grief. Mantoa hears him, she hears them all, but she’s immovable. Her face is like a mask of pain. Mosese seems to be presenting us with a modern day Book of Job. Religious teachings no longer make any sense to Mantoa. She has nothing but anger at God. She experiences all the attempts at consolation to be empty, and who could say that she is wrong in her point of view? Also like Job is her defiance, her refusal to look away from tragedy.

In this version of Job, however, there’s something more. When she complains about trash not being picked up in the graveyard, she finds out that the graveyard, and in fact the entire village, is going to be flooded, and everyone relocated because of a new dam that’s going to be built. The village head tells everyone that it’s all part of modern progress. The priest says they must accept the inevitable and trust God. But Mantoa sees that the unseen enemies, the businessmen and politicians who are planning this project, are taking away the very earth in which her family is buried, that is, the connection to ancestors, to shared history, and to the life that has been bound to this land for generations. What we’re not told, but what we can infer if we’ve studied colonialism, is that the practice of denying native ownership of the land has not ended with the country’s so-called independence. In this story, it’s the fate of a defiant old woman with nothing more to lose, to embody the force of resistance.

With starkly beautiful photography and an eerie musical score, the movie also uses a framing device that evokes an ironic mythos. An old storyteller narrates the film intermittently while playing a traditional stringed instrument called a lesiba. Yet this fabled figure is sitting in a rough-looking urban setting, sitting in the ruins of some tavern in a darkened city. We are in the real modern world, and we are also in the absolute world of ancient symbols. Mosese unites the high with the low in an experience both mystical and political. This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.

John Schlesinger was part of an exciting generation of young English directors that emerged in the 1960s. He established himself with several successful films, and this gave him the opportunity to break all the rules by making Midnight Cowboy, which became a huge hit. After this triumph, Schlesinger had earned the right to do his own thing—and next he created a more personal film, a story he’d been thinking about for years. Released in 1971, it’s called Sunday Bloody Sunday.

The title, by the way, doesn’t refer to the famous event in Northern Ireland, or the song by U2 about it, which all came later. Here it’s just from a common male expression in England at that time, a weary shrug on a Sunday about having to go back to work or school the next day. The story is infused with this ironic tone—the style of someone who observes people with a compassionate but honest eye.

In London, Daniel, a Jewish doctor (Peter Finch) and Alex, a divorced mother (Glenda Jackson), are both in love with the same man—a bisexual artist named Bob, played by Murray Head. The story covers ten days in these three people’s lives, in which their love for and patience with one another are sorely tried. Schlesinger deftly sidesteps the social drama angle, keeping the focus on private feelings and desires. The picture pays careful attention to the little incidents that make up a day—it has a refreshing natural rhythm.

Everything that happens is colored by the longings of Daniel and Alex. Bob is their happiness, and sometimes they are indeed happy when he’s with them, but he’s also an elusive object, a source of anxiety: Will he leave? Will he run to the other one? It’s written like a modern short story, where plot takes a back seat to permutations of feeling. There’s something remarkably clear-eyed about the movie—the emotions of the characters are real and moving, yet there’s a humorous bite and distance—nothing maudlin, very crisp and even a bit cold.

When Peter Finch and Murray Head do a full mouth kiss in close-up early in the film, I believe that was some sort of a cinematic first. I don’t doubt that it was intended to surprise—in plot terms alone, it’s a way to suddenly let us know that Daniel and Bob are lovers. But what I find admirable is that gay sexuality is not sensationalized, it’s simply an important element of Daniel’s character, and it is taken for granted as a fact in itself—which for 1971 was more than ahead of its time, it was beyond its time.

Finch is marvelous, conveying quiet dignity along with a childlike neediness and petulance—never pathetic, just a bit lost and sad. A sequence at a bar mitzvah is priceless, with all his pushy female relatives trying to hook him up with a woman. It says more about what Daniel’s growing up must have been like than any number of flashbacks could have done. Glenda Jackson is also fine here, very natural and high-spirited. And Murray Head is certainly attractive as Bob, although I couldn’t help but think: what do they see in him? Sunday Bloody Sunday is a thoroughly enjoyable example of early ‘70s spirit.

For those who survive a war, the trauma never completely goes away. Hive, the debut feature of Kosovan writer and director Blerta Basholli, is set in a village in Kosovo in 2006, seven years after the end of the war with Serbia. Many of the women in the village are still waiting to learn the fate of their missing husbands. Serbian paramilitaries and regular troops murdered thousands of civilians in a campaign of terror during that war.

The main character in Hive is based on a real person, Fahrije Hoti and is played by a marvelous actress named Yllka Gashi. After much effort and struggle, Fahrije has realized that she can’t support her two kids or her disabled father-in-law with her absent husband’s failing honey business. We see her diligently tending the hives and extracting the honey, then straining and bottling it, but the volume is too small to bring in enough money. At local gatherings of the women whose men are missing, Fahrije proposes that they band together to make and sell ajvar, a popular condiment made from red peppers and eggplant. Anticipating the pressure from their conservative families, most of the women don’t want to take this chance, and only one of them agrees to work with Fahrije.

The older men of the village, patriarchal Muslims, hate when women act independently. Moreover, they assume all the women are widows and believe that it’s unseemly for widows to even appear in public. When Fahrije gets a driver’s license and starts driving a car in town, delivering jars of ajvar to the market, someone throws a rock through one of her car windows. As time goes on, the men continue to harass her with petty acts of vandalism and aggression. When other women eventually decide to take part in the business, the hostility escalates. Basholli doesn’t shrink from revealing how the older traditional ways of rural Kosovo act as a chain around the necks of the women, even when the desperation of trying to make a living in this postwar environment justifies their enterprise. It’s just an unfortunate fact about this society, which the film shows us without even really commenting on it. Against this discouraging background we also get to witness the good things that happen when women work together—Basholli depicts the quiet joyfulness of self-sufficient women acting as a community.

As counterpoint to the main story about forming a business is the story of Fahrije’s daily struggle with grief, still unsure about the fate of her husband, and the tension this causes in the family. Her father-in-law is bitter about losing his son, and gets angry at Fahrije for stirring up controversy in the village. When Fahrije tries to sell her husband’s bench saw to help fund the business, her teenage daughter takes it as an insult to her father, whom she of course wants to believe is still alive. All of these are symptoms of unspoken grief, which will endure even if there’s resolution.

A few weeks ago on this show I reviewed Quo Vadis, Aida? another film about the Balkan wars which, like this one, is directed by a woman. The impact of war crimes and mass murder is a lasting one, as we can see even 23 years after the end of the fighting in the former Yugoslavia. Basholli’s style in Hive is not heightened or melodramatic, but sober, gritty and matter-of-fact. Yllka Gashi plays the lead role with admirable seriousness and restraint. Hive is a finely modulated work of grief, and courage.

The classic Harlem Renaissance novel by Ella Larsen about the American delusion of race is beautifully adapted by Rebecca Hall.

Passing is a remarkable film about what we used to call the color line, the distinction between races that has permeated American history. It is the debut of Rebecca Hall as director and writer, a gifted actress now going behind the camera. Passing is adapted by Hall from the famous 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen, an important writer in what has come to be called The Harlem Renaissance.

In midtown Manhattan, sometime in the 1920s, Irene, a young woman played by Tessa Thompson, furtively enters a fancy hotel, lowering her hat to help conceal her face. Only later do we realize that she’s “passing,” on a small scale just in this part of town. “Passing” was when people of color who were light-skinned enough, managed to successfully pretend being white. Irene wouldn’t normally be allowed in this hotel. She lives in Harlem, married with two kids.

While enjoying a refreshment, she’s startled to see someone she knows from her younger days in Chicago—Clare, played by Ruth Negga, laughing and having casual conversations with some white friends. Clare sees Irene, approaches her with affection and invites her to her hotel room for some drinks. Clare has blonde hair and is a good deal lighter skinned than Irene, and after they go up to the room, she reveals that she’s totally passing for white in every part of her life, including having a white husband,, and a daughter. We can see that all this produces wonderment in the mind of Irene at her old friend’s audacity. Then Clare’s husband shows up, astonishingly addressing his wife as “Nig” which he explains is a joke because Clare seems to have gotten darker after the birth of their child. Actually, he says, he hates Negroes, and neither he nor Clare will go near them. Thus begins a suspenseful exploration of the complex structure of racism in the Jim Crow era, which by the way, affected black Americans throughout the country, not just in the South.

Nowadays it’s just part of life to see people, and actually be people, that look like Irene or Clare, and in general we use the word multiracial. But back then, even if the only person of color in your family tree was a great grandparent, you were to be legally considered a Negro. The racist beliefs of the time meant that one drop of so-called black blood took away your white privileges. I imagine that one of the reasons Rebecca Hall shot this film in black and white is that it makes it easier for a modern audience to believe that Thompson and Negga’s characters could pass. And besides the metaphorical angle of “black and white,” it’s an opportunity to depict a deeper character study, because black and white photography makes everything seem more subjective, and Hall is mainly interested in the inner drama of what the characters are feeling and thinking.

In fact, our point of view character is Tessa Thompson’s Irene. The film shows us almost everything that happens through her eyes. When Clare expresses regret at leaving the black community, and starts to visit Irene in Harlem, the uncertainty Clare represents, along with her risky breaking of boundaries, make Irene feel insecure. She desperately wants to believe that her position is not threatened, that her family is safe, and that she can live separately from white society without worry. But Irene’s fear comes up to the surface anyway, in the form of jealousy. She is in for a shock.

Thompson, Negga, and all the supporting cast are great. The pacing is just right. Passing is a film of rare sensibility—a subtle and nuanced drama of American illusions.

We’ve all seen commercials, and we know how corporations and businesses promote not only their products but their image—stories that are basically about their own benevolence, with happy consumers served by happily dedicated workers making life better. And let’s face it, we all know it’s a pitch, a promotional angle, or if not we should know it, and yet we have been bombarded with it for so long that we don’t really question it. And so to break through that story with satire, with a sense of humor sharpened by awareness of the truth that is hidden behind the hype, is a rare thing to attempt in a film. But Spanish writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa has just pulled this off in his latest film, a clever dark comedy called The Good Boss.

Javier Bardem plays Julio Blanco, the owner of a company that manufactures industrial scales. He’s charming and charismatic, and supervises his company with a personal touch, often saying that he sees the employees as his family, and promising to take the time to listen to any problems they may have. Near the beginning of the movie he makes a speech to inspire the workers, informing them that an awards committee will soon visit the factory, and asking them to pull together to make a good impression so that they can win this prestigious award for excellence.

Bardem had me smiling and chuckling from the get-go. This guy Blanco is a smooth talker indeed, and a master of pleasant sounding B.S. On some level, of course, he believes his own story, and this is a big part of why Bardem is so funny here. As the film goes on, we see more and more how Blanco’s image as the good, caring boss is a calculated strategy for achieving his own ends.

There are obstacles in his way. A longtime employee who was recently fired comes in and makes a big fuss, accusing the company of betrayal and demanding his job back. After he’s escorted out of the building, he sets up a little camp across from the factory, on public land so he can’t be evicted, yelling slogans against Blanco all day, through a bullhorn. What if the awards committee sees this? Blanco has to find a way to make him leave. In addition to this, his director of operations is making lots of expensive mistakes, and the reason he gives is that he can’t focus on work because his wife, who also works at the company, is having an affair. The biggest obstacle of all, though, is really Blanco himself, who, while to all appearances happily married, has a roving eye for young attractive female employees. He’s gotten away with it so far, but a beautiful intern named Liliana, played by Almudena Amor, could spell trouble.

All of these plot threads (and there are more) weave themselves throughout the story to wryly amusing effect. Blanco uses his charm and friendliness, his aura as a good boss, to twist things around for his advantage. But everything starts to fall apart, and it’s hilarious to watch him desperately trying to navigate his way out of the mess he has ultimately caused.

Implied throughout the film is a sharp critique of the phony mindset, the relentless fake positivity of corporate self-presentation. The Good Boss is ultimately not a farce, but a very measured piece of work, even rather dramatic at times, because the issues at stake are quite real. De Aranoa’s writing and direction is very slick and accomplished, and everything fits together perfectly, but the reason it all works so well is Javier Bardem, in a part that showcases this actor’s tremendous talent.

There was a minor category of Hollywood films, made between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in late ’41, that I’ve nicknamed “We Need to Enter the War” films. The American public was largely wary of joining in—the attitude being “let Europe solve its own problems”—but a significant portion of the filmmaking industry wanted people to know about the danger of isolationism. Possibly the best example of this kind of movie is Foreign Correspondent, from 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, himself a recent arrival to Hollywood from England.

A brash young reporter (played by Joel McCrea) is sent to Europe on the eve of war to provide a fresh perspective for American readers. He hooks up with a peace organization in Holland, run by the urbane Mr. Fisher (Herbert Marshall), and falls in love with Fisher’s daughter (Laraine Day). When the reporter witnesses the assassination of a Dutch diplomat who was central to the cause of peace, he ends up on the trail of a mysterious organization of spies.

It’s easy to forget that the thriller genre didn’t get very much respect until Hitchcock came around. He brought style and dedication to the form, and this particular example is one of the smoothest and most entertaining films of the ‘40s. There are two great set pieces. The assassination scene, in which a man shoots the diplomat during a downpour, then escapes through a sea of umbrellas, is a complex masterwork of editing. It’s soon followed by a sequence in a windmill (Hitchcock had a fondness for staging scenes in such out of the ordinary places) where McCrea manages to slink through the building, escaping the spies’ notice while the inner machinery rotates the blades, the moving camera providing a perfect sense of the spatial relationships in the windmill. What was already a stock situation (good guy hides within earshot of bad guys) is transformed into pure visual pleasure and excitement.

One of the more curious aspects of the film is the character played by George Sanders, a suave and witty English reporter who happens to be a friend of Fisher’s daughter, and helps the American reporter solve the mystery. Sanders is great here—in fact, he’s so good that he becomes the film’s hero, playing the key role of daredevil rescuer in the film’s finale, rather than the star McCrea, as Hollywood convention would dictate. Did Hitchcock and his screenwriter Charles Bennett, both British, elevate the English character’s role as some kind of tribute to the mother country, which was under violent siege at the time of filming? I don’t know, but it’s certainly unusual—not that it spoils the fun in any way.

Foreign Correspondent ends with a bit of uplifting propaganda, McCrea broadcasting a warning to the rest of the world, and this is perfectly understandable. But its value as entertainment outweighs its political significance, then and now.

French filmmaker Claire Denis, whom I consider one of our greatest living directors, likes to play around with genre from time to time. Her latest picture is called Both Sides of the Blade, and if you read the ad copy it’s being called a love triangle. Well, it’s like no triangle I’ve ever seen. In fact, her editing strategies and her masterful use of music make the film seem as if it’s going to turn into a scary suspense thriller at any moment.

The story starts with Sara and Jean, a middle aged couple blissfully in love, played by Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon. Denis carefully establishes their intimacy in the beginning sequence where they’re on vacation together. How satisfying it is to watch a director allowing her actors time to establish convincing, lived-in characters. This is the third time in a row that Binoche has starred in a Denis movie, and also Lindon’s third time working with her. Denis’ familiarity with her performers pays off with especially fine and nuanced work from these two.

Returning to Paris, trouble begins right away when Sara on her way to work happens to see a man (played by Grégoire Colin) on a motorcycle. Later we see her overwhelmed with emotion, out of breath, saying the man’s name, François, repeatedly in a tone that sounds more shocked than pleased. She tells Jean later that she saw François, and his reaction is muted. Gradually we learn that François is Sara’s ex, and also Jean’s former friend, whom neither of them has seen for ten years. A further element of mystery is introduced: Jean has finished serving ten years in prison, and is consequently having trouble finding work.

For Denis, a story never happens separately from society or politics or ideas. In this story, Sara is the host of a radio show in which she interviews various figures in progressive and anti-colonial circles. There’s no need for viewers to make too much of this—it’s another way of establishing characters in a full-bodied fictional world. But it’s also a reminder that there are many other things, and much worse problems, than the travails of personal relationships.

So, François offers Jean a job. He hesitates, but Sara says it’s fine. The private reactions, however, that we’ve seen her express when seeing François, contradict what she’s telling Jean. And thus we embark on what I never thought of as a triangle while watching, because of the peculiar nature of this story. François seems almost like a demonic figure, since we never get inside him like we’re allowed to get inside the two leads. Was he responsible in some way for Jean going to prison? What we do see quite vividly is that a duality is at play in Sara’s heart, a duality of which she herself is only vaguely aware.

The emotional agonies that Sara and Jean put themselves through as the film goes on are the fulfillment of all Denis’ suspense film clues. It’s especially brilliant in the case of Juliette Binoche, who takes us on a dark journey into some strange complications of desire. The film doesn’t answer all our plot questions. It does show how much deeper and more mysterious the relationships between women and men are than we usually care to acknowledge. Both Sides of the Blade presents, in its stylish way, that mystery.

In the history of Indian film, there’s a dividing line between approximately the first forty years of the movie industry, and the release, in 1955, of the first film by Bengali writer and director Satyajit Ray. It’s called Pather Panchali, which roughly translated into English means Song of the Road. Before Pather Panchali, Indian films adhered to a formula of simplistic melodramas or comedies with songs and dancing—in fact, this is the tradition that still dominates today, albeit in a more sophisticated way, and that has come to be nicknamed Bollywood.

Ray worked for ten years as a layout editor at a Calcutta ad agency, but his secret love was cinema. He read all the books and magazines he could find about filmmaking. In 1949, the great French director Jean Renoir arrived in India to make his movie The River, and Ray worked part time for him scouting locations. Renoir encouraged him to pursue his dreams. The following year, Ray put his savings together, got a small loan, borrowed money from his family, and began shooting. Most of his crew had no experience. His cinematographer had never shot a film before.

Pather Panchali was adapted from a well-known autobiographical novel, written in 1928 by the Bengali author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. It’s about a poor family in rural Bengal around 1910. The family consists of the parents—the father is often away trying desperately to make a living, the mother frets and scolds and feels lonely—a daughter and son, and an elderly aunt. The story is centered on the 6-year-old son, Apu, and his innocent reactions to what goes on around him in his family and village.

Watching this film is like peeking into an actual place and time. Little details, like the dragonflies playing on the water, create a sense of place while evoking feelings about events that are happening in the lives of the family. The small incidents that go to make up Apu’s life are soul-stirring because of the picture’s basic honesty about people. These characters are not idealized. The mother nags, her desire for security getting the better of her compassion. The father is a dreamer whose irresponsibility puts the family at risk. The sister, Durga, a few years older than Apu, steals things. Yet they are also decent, loving people. The mother in particular (in an amazing performance by Karuna Bannerjee, an amateur, as was most of the cast) gains immeasurably in stature as the film progresses. And the figure of the old auntie is very moving—childish and sometimes petulant, she also shows a gentleness and tolerance much needed by the daughter.

When Ray couldn’t afford any more film, he used bits of the discarded film ends that were left around at the Calcutta studios. But finally, after a year and a half, he ran out of money and filming stopped. After scrambling for over a year, he managed to receive more funding. Working on a deadline, his friend Ravi Shankar composed the film’s musical score in one day. Then it was released—to immediate acclaim and sold-out theaters. It was shown at Cannes and eventually given international distribution. Pather Panchali was the first Indian film to receive worldwide attention.

As it turned out, this was the first in a trilogy. The other two films: Aparajito  and Apur Sansar  are excellent as well. They follow Apu into adolescence and adulthood, turning the Apu trilogy into a national cinematic epic with Apu representing the soul of India.

The terror and helplessness of civilians caught in a genocidal war is a reality powerfully captured by Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Žbanić in her film Quo Vadis, Aida? “Quo vadis?” is a Latin phrase that became famous in Christian stories about persecution during the Roman Empire. It basically means “Where are you going?” and it was used as something God would say to a frightened believer. But in this case, the question has an urgently modern import, being posed to a woman named Aida, played by Jasna Đuričić, who faces the most catastrophic threat she could imagine.

Aida is a Bosnian teacher, who in 1995 works as a translator for UN forces in the town of Srebrenica, near the Serbian border. After three years of siege, the UN officers assure town officials that the Serbian army will suffer airstrikes if they dare to attack. But when Serbia advances on the city, their promises prove empty, and the population flees to the UN base nearby, which is manned by Dutch forces. They only let a few thousand people into the building, leaving thousands more stranded outside the fence in the heat with no food or water. While continuing to work as a translator between Bosnian civilians and the Dutch UN forces, Aida frantically seeks a way to get her husband and two adult sons out of danger. She knows what the UN officers won’t admit, that the promises of the Serbians, led by a war criminal, General Mladić, can’t be trusted.

Almost every moment in this movie is tense and gripping. The Serbs target men for executions because they suspect all Bosnian men of being fighters in anti-Serbian forces. When General Mladic wants to talk to the UN officers he also asks for some representatives of the people of Srebrenica, and when no one volunteers, Aida suggests her husband, who’s a high school principal, as a way of getting him inside the compound. Mladic promises that all the civilians will be transported safely to another town in buses, and the UN people agree. But Aida senses that’s not safe, so she hides her husband and sons in various places on the base in a difficult and dangerous effort at evasion.

The Serbians arrive at the compound and demand to be let in to check for weapons, and we witness their deplorable and abusive behavior. Žbanić expertly evokes the overwhelming fear of people who are basically at the mercy of their worst enemies. While watching this, I kept thinking of the mistreatment and atrocities we’re seeing now in Ukraine. The horrifying atmosphere of total war, which seems distant and abstract when we only hear about it, comes to life minute by minute in this film. The acting is amazing, making you forget that this is a movie and experience something close to the reality of state terrorism in a way that is impossible to forget.

The film also shows us the conflict eventually ending, and society returning to what appears to be a more normal condition. Yet there are always those who escape the consequences of their crimes, while the suffering and trauma of their victims remain. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a great and towering indictment of our continued acceptance of violence and war.

Before New Zealand director Peter Jackson became world famous for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, he had a cult following for directing a few horror and zombie films that featured wild special effects and stop-motion animation. Then in 1994, at age 32, Jackson showed that he could handle a movie with wider significance and appeal. That film was Heavenly Creatures, a story based on a notorious murder case from the early 1950s in Christchurch, New Zealand. As was to be the case in all his future work, Jackson wrote the screenplay with his wife, Fran Walsh. This was the film that fascinated me when I first saw it in 1995, and then quickly went to see it again.

After the picture establishes its time and place with part of an actual 1954 newsreel about Christchurch, we meet Pauline Rieper, a lonely and painfully self-conscious teenage girl played by 16-year-old newcomer Melanie Lynskey. Her parents and siblings don’t understand why Pauline is always so angry and withdrawn, although we in the audience can sense that the difficult and confusing effects of puberty clearly play a role. Ignored by her classmates at a girls’ school, and disliked by teachers, Pauline is bewildered about her life, an experience well conveyed through Jackson’s bold camera effects and frenetic editing. Then, an English girl arrives at the school, Juliet Hulme, played by the 17-year-old Kate Winslet. Vivacious, imaginative, and boldly rebellious, Juliet immediately captivates Pauline, and reaches out to her in friendship, which the shy girl responds to with all the repressed passion of her soul. Winslet had previously appeared on English TV, but this was her first role in a movie. She and Lynskey give powerful, revelatory performances.

The bond between Pauline and Juliet quickly becomes rather intense. Pauline introduces her friend to the music of her idol, the tenor Mario Lanza. Their enmeshment expresses itself in imaginative play-acting: they pretend to be fantasy heroines in a mythical kingdom, giving themselves different names and acting out little stories. Here Jackson introduces his animation techniques—large “claymation” type figures dancing, singing, and embracing the girls in the courtyard of a medieval castle. The girls’ fantasies not only celebrate their bond, but express anger and hostility towards authority figures who try to discipline them.

The trouble starts when Juliet’s father feels disturbed by how involved the two girls are in each other. He thinks it’s unhealthy, and he tells Pauline’s mother that. Both sets of parents try to discourage the friendship in various ways, but of course this only makes the attachment stronger and more determined. When the Hulmes decide to move back to England, Juliet and Pauline think they’re being persecuted. Faced with the unthinkable prospect of separation, their fragile minds go over the edge.

Heavenly Creatures is a fever dream of a movie. Sometimes it seems like you can barely catch your breath with Jackson’s relentless, flamboyant style, funny at first but ultimately tragic. No film that I’ve seen has captured the insanity of adolescence, the inability to see a future in the pressure of today, than this film has. Heavenly Creatures’ remarkable compassion for its misguided characters brings us to painful and unforgettable awareness.

I recently took a trip on Amtrak that included staying in a sleeping car, and although there were practical reasons for this, my inner movie lover also wanted to experience first hand something like the train journeys I’ve loved watching in the movies. From Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century through more than one Hitchcock film, to Richard Linkater’s Before Sunrise, passenger trains have been a time-honored cinematic tradition. Compartment Number 6, a film from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, takes this classic set-up and gives it a refreshingly intimate turn.

We first meet Laura, a young Finnish archaeology student played by Seidi Haarla, at a chic cocktail party in Moscow hosted by a woman we eventually figure out is her lover, a Russian professor named Irina. Laura is about to travel north to the Arctic Circle city of Murmansk to study newly discovered 5000 year-old petroglyphs there, a detail which dates our story to the late 1990s. Laura wants to feel excited about her trip, but she’s sad because Irina has decided not to go with her, so that in addition to feeling out of place in Russia as a Finn with a minimal grasp of the language, she senses that Irina is giving the brush-off to her relationship.

When Laura gets on the train, she’s in for a shock, discovering that she’s sharing the tiny compartment with a young Russian mine worker named Ljoha, played by Yuriy Borisov. He’s a swaggering, almost illiterate tough guy in the process of trying to get as drunk as possible on vodka while filling the little sleeping car with his cigarette smoke. The conversation does not go well. For some reason he thinks she’s Estonian, and makes insulting sexist comments to her. Is she going to have to spend the entire long journey with this creep? She tries to get a different compartment, but the train is full up.

Now, if you’re thinking in conventional terms, you might wonder if the film’s going to make a love story out of this unpromising situation. Thankfully, it doesn’t do that, instead carefully and believably depicting a process by which two people gradually allow themselves to recognize each other for who they really are behind their social masks. The chance of friendship and connection is in this case more meaningful than any kind of romance.

Kuosmanen shot most of the picture on an actual train, with close-ups vividly communicating the cramped atmosphere inside, a confinement that is set against the winter landscape seen rushing by outside the windows. There are also important scenes that are not on the train, including at Murmansk, where the resolution between these two completely opposite characters is achieved with beautiful understatement. Much of the credit for this is due to the two actors, who convey so much more than expected, revealing that their fears of how other people see them have become an obstacle in their lives.

Based on a novel by Finnish author Rosa Liksom, the picture makes fun in a gentle way of the stereotyped differences between Finland and Russia, a subject which is especially interesting in light of current tensions between the two countries. Compartment Number 6 doesn’t take anything for granted, but starts at something like square one in human relations and makes something very surprising and worthwhile out of it.

The meanings that we access through works of art are not confined to the conscious intentions of the artists. This critical truth came to mind while watching The Qatsi Trilogy—three films directed by Godfrey Reggio, and scored by Philip Glass.

These are films without any talking, just imagery and music. The only text comes at the end, when the odd-sounding film titles are explained. Philip Glass’s music is an essential component. It’s not the usual situation where the music accompanies a narrative, or helps illustrate it. The music is united to the visuals as if they were one thing. I know people who are maddened by Glass’s music, which is characterized by a lot of repetition. But here it aligns the viewer’s attention and emotions with the images. The repetitive motifs help the mind let go of the scattered, wandering forms of attention that can be habitual for us.

Koyaanisqatsi, from 1982, starts with shots of nature in awe-inspiring aspects: mountains, canyons, deserts, and so on, with human beings conspicuously absent. Eventually we shift to footage of modern civilization, and in comparison to nature these images seem bizarre and outlandish. Two techniques comprise most of the film: slow motion and fast motion. The fast motion is actually time-lapse photography: footage of events that take hours or even days appearing to take place in just minutes. The movement of vehicles, traffic zipping through huge highway systems, masses of people, colossal buildings in major cities and the traffic within those cities: time-lapse photography takes away the familiarity of these things and makes them seem alien. In purely visual terms, the images are astounding, weird, beautiful, yet disturbing. Slow motion is used when we are looking at things more close up, especially people. Watching the movement of a crowd in slow motion, the familiar is once again supplanted by the sensation of strangeness. These beings, in the way they move, the way they avoid each other’s gaze, evoke questions and doubts about human nature, our striving and seeking, our ignorance and mortality.

Powaqqatsi, from 1988, refrains from time-lapse photography, but it still uses a lot of slow motion. Here the footage is from the lands of non-European people. First we see traditional forms of work such as planting. Then civilization shows up. Instead of fairly well-dressed folks we see a much poorer populace. Modernity has conquered this non-white world, but it hasn’t helped the people. Here’s the theme of injustice and exploitation, and one’s heart hurts more watching this than it did during the more alienated first film.

Naqoyqatsi was released in 2002, after a gap of thirteen years. Why this long delay I don’t know. The film uses graphics, animation, and rotoscope photography to visualize the mind realm, the world of thinking and science. The mathematical and geometric designs become like a relentless drum beat of “progress.” Eventually the rhythm becomes the marching of soldiers, the creation of weapons, guns firing and the detonation of bombs. It shows the cleverness of humans serving the expansion of war.

One thing that makes The Qatsi Trilogy difficult is that it seeks to evoke the impersonal as the source of meaning in the modern world. This allows us to recognize a certain kind of insanity in civilization. We are offered a different way of seeing and hearing.

I felt many strong emotions while watching Vortex, the new film by Gaspar Noé, an Argentine director who lives and works in Paris. As far as what the movie is about, it seems fairly straightforward. An elderly married couple in Paris experiences increasing challenges. The husband is a film scholar with some health issues. The wife is a retired psychiatrist who is sliding into dementia. They have an adult son with his own troubles who doesn’t know how to help his father deal with the deteriorating situation. The story sounds very similar to Amour, the Michael Haneke film from 2012, and the way it sometimes highlights how scary dementia can be for the person suffering from it, brings to mind The Father with Anthony Hopkins, directed by Florian Zeller, which was more recent. Those were both great films. But the resemblances are actually kind of superficial. Noé has crafted a formal structure that makes Vortex unique.

Almost the entire film is presented in split screen: two motion pictures side by side with borders, like window frames. For a good deal of the time, the husband is on one side, the wife on the other. She wakes up first and starts puttering around the house. Eventually he gets out of bed and goes about the normal business of his day. At first it might seem difficult to follow two images at once—the eye moves from one to the other to try to catch everything. Eventually one gets used to the technique. The man seems relatively lucid and talkative, calling people on the phone about a book he’s writing, and so forth. The woman goes out of the apartment and wanders into a couple of shops, and we notice that she becomes more and more tentative, looking lost and puzzled.

The split screen encourages us to value both subjective points of view equally, rather than favor one over the other, and I think that’s perhaps the most important reason the director chose to do this. The husband’s words and behavior are understandable, but we also identify with the wife’s fear and bewilderment, such is the incredible performance by Françoise Lebrun as this old woman struggling to find words to express her catastrophic loss of memory in which everything seems strange and somehow wrong. The husband, by the way, is played by the famous horror director Dario Argento.

Later, Noé introduces variations in the form. Husband and wife are sometimes in the same room—we still have a split screen where we see them from different angles. When their son comes to help them a little, and brings along his little boy, he replaces one of the points of view in the split screen, or the three of them are together in two different angles. And there are further permutations. The director sticks to this device to both divide and broaden our attention.

I suppose any film featuring dementia as a major element might end up being about a lot more. Vortex is thought-provoking in the best sense. We’re forced to confront the nature of memory and its relationship to identity, and the fact of mortality, which we so often avoid. In the end, it’s not the style or the artfulness that matters here, it’s the unsparing honesty. We see how even the most loving among us are so involved in ourselves that we can’t fully listen to one another, and we see that gap also in the eyes of the mother looking for some unknown key to explain her distress. The truth is always more compassionate than anything comforting we try to say. Vortex has that kind of compassion.

A splendid adaptation of Balzac’s great novel about a young poet becoming embroiled in the petty world of Paris journalism in the 1820s.

Lost Illusions is an adaptation of a classic 19th century novel by Honoré de Balzac. The history of film is full of examples of great books that have failed to be made into good movies, so it’s an unexpected delight to see a movie that does justice to its source. Lost Illusions is not only an excellent period drama recreating with its costumes, sets, and production design Paris in the 1820s, but a faithful translation of the vision of its brilliant world-famous author into cinematic terms. It’s directed by Xavier Gianolli, the creator of another fine period film, Marguerite, that I reviewed a few years ago; who, with Jacques Fieschi, also adapted Balzac’s novel for the screen.

The story concerns a naïve provincial poet, Lucien Chardon, played by the perfectly cast young actor Benjamin Voisin, who dreams of escaping the drudgery of his life working at a printing press in his small town by writing and publishing his own poetry. His talent and good looks catch the attention of a local unhappily married noblewoman played by Cécile de France, who, seeking to advance his career ends up having an affair with him. When her infidelity is suspected by her rich husband, she flees to the refuge of her influential aristocratic cousin in Paris, with Lucien in tow. But his immature country manners stick out like a sore thumb in high class Parisian society, and she’s forced to abandon him or be ostracized. Faced with poverty and starvation, Lucien luckily falls in with the editor of one of the city’s literary journals, and gains a reputation as an acerbic theater critic and satirist. This world of the periodical press reveals itself as ruthlessly cutthroat, ruled only by the desire for money and not for art. The amoral atmosphere and the easy money turns his head, and when he falls in love with an actress from the cheap Boulevard stage, it becomes more and more difficult to navigate the treacherous politics and backbiting of Paris journalism.

Balzac was writing about a moment in history when many features of the modern world were being born. The revolution and Napoleon’s wars of empire were over; the old Bourbon dynasty had been restored, and a new way of life in which money was the sole value of the social order was taking root. Giannoli paints a meticulous picture of a world in which honesty and noble motives were disdained, when writers paid for good reviews in the paper, or got bad reviews when their enemies paid more. One of the characters organizes groups of audience members who will clap or boo a stage production based on which side has paid him the most money. Royalists and anti-royalists square off in print, and Lucien is clumsy enough to make enemies in both camps. He seeks to be known not by his father’s name Chardon, but by the noble pedigree of his mother, de Rubempré. In the end everything comes down to class, and the success or failure of being included in the upper class. The new version of society that Balzac was condemning was ultimately a replay of the same old story of privilege and domination.

Full of character and incident, beautifully shot and acted, Lost Illusions is a triumph. Although the film necessarily trims some of the book’s subplots, it’s a splendid and accurate portrayal of the great French novelist’s insights about the corrupting power of money and class. And although it takes place two hundred years ago, one can find many parallels to our time.

Paris Calligrammes: that’s not exactly a movie title that would pique everyone’s curiosity. It’s written and directed by an experimental visual artist and filmmaker named Ulrike Ottinger. I can assure you that she doesn’t take appealing to a mass audience into consideration. She makes films for herself and others who are interested in art and creativity for their own sake.

Ottinger, who turned 80 this year, tells of her experiences in Paris as a young artist, from the time she left her provincial German town in 1962 at age 20, her car breaking down on the way, after which she hitchhiked to the city. She accompanies her narration with a wealth of footage from home movies, newsreels, TV excerpts, still photos, fiction films, and film of life in Paris today. Different sections highlight different aspects of her Paris experience.

She starts with her discovery of the Librairie Calligrammes, a store specializing in German books owned by Fritz Picard, a Jewish German exile. The word “Calligrammes” was taken from a poem by Guillame Apollinaire, who defines it as a text that creates an image with its letters. By using this word as part of the film’s title, Ottinger is signaling the same artistic purpose of creating an image in the mind through her narration. Anyway, she discovered this German language book store, and the owner, Picard, opened a door for her to a world of intellectual émigrés, including Hans Richter, Paul Celan, and Walter Mehring, that was centered on Dada and Surrealist art and literature. We see an interview with Picard, and hear Mehring recite a masterful poem mourning the deaths of German artists who resisted fascism. This one section is so full of interesting people and stories that I thought this might be the whole movie. But it’s a film of many parts, and although it runs only a little over two hours, it’s brimming with so much incident and detail that I can only marvel that Ottinger has managed to fit it all in.

Other sections cover her friends among the city’s avant-garde visual artists, neighborhoods in which she lived, the vital film scene clustered around Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Française, Ottinger’s own progression as an artist influenced by the Dada and Pop Art movements, the left wing politics that pulled Paris intellectuals together in the late ‘60s (and then pushed them apart), and much more. Ottinger was always openly lesbian, and that reality is taken as an assumed basis here, one of the aspects of her life that informs her work.

I found myself stopping the film at times (the great advantage we have in our video era!) to make notes about the film’s numerous anecdotes, remarks, and insights. Ottinger doesn’t try to attain an illusory comprehensiveness, but just by talking about her own experience, her own world, she provides a sense of the excitement and ferment of that time that I’ve never seen equaled.

I would say that this picture is an example of the diary or notebook form within what I call non-fiction film. The word “documentary” is really tired out now, and fails to do justice to the variety we witness in films that are not narrative or dramatic stories. Ottinger uses archival material with an eye towards what you haven’t seen before, avoiding the kind of stock photo montage that we encounter in straight “objective” histories. There’s a lot to take in, and I felt intellectually and emotionally enriched after watching it.

Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz made several award-winning documentaries before moving from Israel to Philadelphia four years ago. I remembered him from an interesting 2003 fiction film called James’ Journey to Jerusalem, in which a young Jewish African man emigrates to Israel and is surprised by the racism he experiences from other Jews. The theme was serious, but the treatment was low-key, scrupulously respectful of the characters, and often humorous. His documentary work is also compassionate and open-minded. The latest of these, from 2019, is the simplest and at the same time most provocative of Alexandrowicz’s films. It’s called The Viewing Booth.

Alexandrowicz invited seven Temple University students to watch videos of Palestinian interactions with the Israeli military and settlers, about half of the videos by a human rights group, critical of Israeli policy, called B’Tselem, and the other half by various pro-Israel sources. They were encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings while watching. One of the seven students had to cancel, and a young Jewish student named Maia Levi expressed interest in being part of the project, so she ended up filling that slot. It is her experience viewing the videos in a booth that we are first shown.

Levi is intelligent, solidly pro-Israel, and expresses a lot of skepticism about the videos. Part of the time we just watch her face as she reacts to the material, and listen to her comments, and eventually we also see what she is being shown. She doesn’t accept any video on face value. For example, she says that an official IDF video showing a soldier being nice to a Palestinian kid and giving him a piece of cheese is obviously staged, and that it’s an unconvincing and ineffective message. She expresses similar doubts about the B’Tselem videos. How did cameras just happen to be in these situations where we see Israeli soldiers and settlers misbehaving? What is the context of these events, and why aren’t we being told about what preceded them?

Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz made several award-winning documentaries before moving from Israel to Philadelphia four years ago. I remembered him from an interesting 2003 fiction film called James’ Journey to Jerusalem, in which a young Jewish African man emigrates to Israel and is surprised by the racism he experiences from other Jews. The theme was serious, but the treatment was low-key, scrupulously respectful of the characters, and often humorous. His documentary work is also compassionate and open-minded. The latest of these, from 2019, is the simplest and at the same time most provocative of Alexandrowicz’s films. It’s called The Viewing Booth.

Alexandrowicz invited seven Temple University students to watch videos of Palestinian interactions with the Israeli military and settlers, about half of the videos by a human rights group, critical of Israeli policy, called B’Tselem, and the other half by various pro-Israel sources. They were encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings while watching. One of the seven students had to cancel, and a young Jewish student named Maia Levi expressed interest in being part of the project, so she ended up filling that slot. It is her experience viewing the videos in a booth that we are first shown.

Levi is intelligent, solidly pro-Israel, and expresses a lot of skepticism about the videos. Part of the time we just watch her face as she reacts to the material, and listen to her comments, and eventually we also see what she is being shown. She doesn’t accept any video on face value. For example, she says that an official IDF video showing a soldier being nice to a Palestinian kid and giving him a piece of cheese is obviously staged, and that it’s an unconvincing and ineffective message. She expresses similar doubts about the B’Tselem videos. How did cameras just happen to be in these situations where we see Israeli soldiers and settlers misbehaving? What is the context of these events, and why aren’t we being told about what preceded them? Now, this isn’t someone just lazily dismissing things and automatically parroting stuff she’s heard. Levi is sincerely engaging with the task that Alexandrowicz has set for her, and it’s fascinating.

I have to admit I was prepared to not like this film because I thought I knew what would happen. But I was wrong. Alexandrowicz asked her back for a second session. She was the only one he asked back. When he watches the videos, it demonstrates that the Israeli occupation is wrong. But her reaction to the scenes of Palestinians getting harassed was so different than his that he wanted to learn more. “If someone is already against the occupation,” he says, “that doesn’t teach us anything about how to reach an audience that hasn’t already made up its mind.” Maia Levi, he says, is his ideal viewer.

In her second session, the director probes Levi about some of the things she said in the first session. The film becomes about something much broader than the issues around Israel and Palestine. It’s about something that movies normally never talk about: the inner experience of the audience member, the viewer, and the tension between what a film shows us, and what we think and feel it. Levi presents a challenge to filmmakers and other artists who try to send a message through their work: can belief systems change because of watching a film or some other piece, and if so, how would the film accomplish that? But it’s also a challenge to the audience to recognize how people respond in many different ways to images, videos, and other media. The Viewing Booth reminds us to look first within ourselves if we are to understand.

After winning the Best Picture Oscar in 2017 for The Shape of Water, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro continues to challenge himself. Turning aside from his customary monster or supernatural-themed stories, he’s now made a crime film, a film noir as people often call it, Nightmare Alley. Hollywood already released a picture with that title back in 1947, starring Tyrone Power, and it’s a good one, but rather than do a remake, Del Toro went back to the original 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, which includes a lot of material that was changed or not used for the older film. And being the stylist that he is, Del Toro has made a movie of intense visual richness, a dark thriller that grabs the viewer every step of the way.

Bradley Cooper plays a cunning grifter named Stanton Carlisle, whom we first see dragging what is clearly a wrapped up dead body into a hole in the floor of a run-down shack, setting it on fire, then walking away while the fire engulfs the house. It’s the late 1930s. On the run, Stan stumbles into a traveling circus, and is hired by the owner and operator, played by Willem Dafoe, as an assistant and maintenance guy. He makes friends with a mentalist act, a husband and wife team played by David Strathairn and Toni Collette, who teach him some of their tricks. He also hooks up with Molly, a sideshow performer played by Rooney Mara, and persuades her to go off with him and embark on their own career as a mentalist act, pretending to read minds and reveal secrets on stage and in nightclubs. But then a femme fatale, a psychiatrist played by Cate Blanchett, gets him involved in a much more high-stakes scheme.

Del Toro loves classic studio-era Hollywood film, to which he’s added his own heady mix of gothic symbolism and mystery. He’s great at making movies that are made completely on sets, or almost completely. That old style of cinematic illusion in which production design, music, and smooth camera work seduces an audience into its world is a perfect match for this director’s talent. As a viewer, I reveled in the artifice of his presentation, the knowledge that this is a movie not detracting one bit from the enjoyment of its style. The film is constantly startling us with vivid tracking shots, close-ups of its often grotesque characters, and unusual camera angles. Nathan Johnson’s music provides an ominous undercurrent to the tale of twisted ambition spinning out of control.

Bradley Cooper really takes it to the limit—this is among his best work yet, a maniacal yet self-contained portrait of a man always grasping for more. Rooney Mara represents a balancing force, an essentially innocent person tricked into crossing ethical boundaries because of her love for Stan. She’s the perfect counterpart to Cooper’s intensity.

A lot of mainstream filmmaking is merely competent at best, not going out of its way to challenge an audience, but tamely imitating all the other stuff out there. Guillermo del Toro is different. With Nightmare Alley, he demonstrates his commitment to continue making terrifically entertaining movies.

Cronenberg made a film called Crimes of the Future back in 1970, with a story that involved mutations, but otherwise is nothing like this new one. It’s not a remake or a sequel. I think he just likes the title, which implies crimes as inevitably following what has been done in our past and can’t be revoked.

This movie takes place in a future dystopia where medical advances have eliminated physical pain from human life. You might think that this would be a good thing, but one of the effects has been to make people more heedless of danger. Many are discovering that new organs are growing in their bodies, organs of unknown function created by some sudden process of evolution. Most, afraid of what may come, choose surgery to remove these organs. In this future, surgery has become almost thoroughly automated, with machines that make all the incisions and extractions just by someone touching a few buttons. And patients are awake during the process, since they can’t feel any pain.

Viggo Mortensen plays a man named Saul Tenser, who is continually growing new organs and has turned the operations into performance art. His partner, a surgeon played by Lea Seydoux, performs these operations in public where people gaze in fascination at whatever new organs she removes from Tenser’s body. He’s agreed to let a small research group, called the National Organ Registry, classify and keep track of all these organs, but this causes trouble when their work comes to the attention of a rogue scientist who wants to do a public performance of an autopsy on his dead mutated child.

Cronenberg’s view of our current situation is an extremely dark one, as you can tell. If you are grossed out easily by blood and guts and people getting cut up, by no means should you see this movie. Nonetheless, the film is not intended merely to shock. In a seductive, almost hypnotic style, and aided by Howard Shore’s ominous music, Cronenberg sends us a warning about our reshaping of the world, physically, morally, and politically. The near future we are shown here is in thrall to a sinister death cult. With the attainment of spiritual numbness, humans have succumbed to a kind of despair in which they’ll go to any lengths just to feel something, and especially pain. Saul Tenser uses a bizarre technological chair and bed that manipulate his body to keep him alive. These devices sustain, but also enslave him. The film reminds us that an immersion in the virtual represents estrangement from the natural.

Crimes of the Future is itself a kind of autopsy of our world predicament, a vision of solemn and unrelenting dread.

Three stories about chance and imagination, written and directed by the up and coming director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

The first story is about a young woman who tells a girl friend about a fascinating man that she just met, and that she spent an entire night in conversation with, everything clicking perfectly, and now they’re going to go on a formal date soon. The friend doesn’t let on, but from the woman’s description she’s pretty sure that this man is her ex. She goes to see him, and the tension-filled encounter tells us about a lot of things one would not suspect, and explores some harsh and uncomfortable truths.

The second story starts with a young man who fails to graduate because of a professor who refuses to accept a late assignment. This teacher has become suddenly famous after writing an award-winning novel. The young man persuades his girlfriend to try to lure the professor into a “honey trap” for revenge, coming on to him so that he’ll be disgraced for being sexually inappropriate. Things get complicated, though.

The final story concerns a woman feeling alienated when she attends a high school reunion. She leaves the reunion, and then by chance runs into a former lover. The other woman invites her over for tea, and the stage is set for some revelations about the past. There’s a clever twist in the plot that I won’t tell you. I’ll only say that the two women use their imaginations to recreate memories and heal their wounds.

The first story ends with uncertainty, the second with bitter irony, and the third with an affirmation of going forward in life. On the soundtrack is a solo piano piece by Robert Schumann: “Scenes of Childhood.” It conveys a mood of wistfulness, even a little sentimentality, so I thought I might be in for something emotionally precious or pretentious. It turns out to be a nice fake move: if the music sets you up to be touched, the hard-edged honesty of the dialogue and the daring ups and downs in the characters’ perceptions of events provide a bracing little shock to the system.

The second story features the reading of a passage from the professor’s book that seems frankly pornographic, just to warn you. The intention, I think, is to make you laugh, or at least that’s what I did. I was continually surprised by the insights that emerged from these stories of chance and mistaken assumptions.

Hamaguchi released this film and another one, the critically acclaimed Drive My Car, both in one year, which is quite an accomplishment. I think I’m probably in a minority in preferring this film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, to the other one. Hamaguchi wrote the three stories here, and so his style, in my opinion, suits his own material in this case more than Drive My Car, which is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, whose unusual prose manner is, in my view, difficult to adapt. Now, don’t get me wrong; it’s a good movie. It’s just that Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy captured my imagination in a way that still resonates strongly with me.

I’m guessing most of you have at least heard of George Orwell’s novel “1984.” It’s about a totalitarian state in the future, one of constant surveillance, in which critical thinking is a crime, and authority is represented by a dictator named Big Brother. An office worker in one of the ministries, Winston Smith, starts to question authority, and initiates a secret love affair with a woman named Julia, even though unsanctioned relationships are illegal. This is the plot, in brief, but perhaps the book has become so familiar that we’ve neglected to read it carefully anymore. Crucially, Orwell’s ideas hinged on language and the way authoritarians use it to hide and distort the facts.

Making a good film version of 1984 is difficult. It’s been tried a few times, with varied success. My favorite version was released in 1984, adapted and directed by a young Englishman named Michael Radford. Radford’s producers and other backers were behind his project, but they insisted that the picture be released in the year 1984, when the media would inevitably start talking about the book, comparing what it said to what the year looked like now, and so forth. That meant they were in a hurry to get it done, and it’s impressive what Radford and his team, under pressure, managed to achieve on a pretty low budget.

The screenplay was very faithful to the book. The director’s first brilliant decision was to make the production design appear, not like some vision of the future, but similar to the styles of the year the book was written, 1948. There are computer, surveillance, and television screens in the film, but all the technology looks shabby and old-fashioned. The vehicles, the offices and other buildings, the clothes, look bleak, like England did after the war.

Roger Deakins, early in what would become a very long career, paints the film in stark gray—a world of grime and confinement. The color photography sometimes looks almost black and white. All the amazing visual effects, such as the crowd scenes at the hate rallies with the large screens and the image of Big Brother, were done in camera—in other words, they were shot just as they appear. Of course there was no computer generated imagery then, but Radford couldn’t even afford the current technology such as blue screens.

In the main role of Winston Smith, Radford cast John Hurt, who conveys a kind of wounded resentment and passivity that gives an edge to the character’s rebellion. The terrible punishment Winston endures Hurt makes palpable—his suffering has a visceral onscreen power. He truly went the extra mile. As Julia, a relative newcomer named Suzanna Hamilton has just the right mix of mischief and defiant strength. But the biggest coup was getting Richard Burton to play O’Brien, the drily sinister official who represents the intellectual voice of the state machine. He was not a well man, and had trouble remembering his lines. This caused some agonizing delays in the shoot. But the final result on screen is utterly compelling, one of his great performances. Instead of trying to act the villain as a lesser performer would do, Burton’s calm and deliberate manner, and the precision and thoughtfulness of his delivery, turns O’Brien into the epitome of totalitarian thinking. It was his last appearance on screen. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage two months before the movie was released.

1984 did OK at the time—not a big hit. Since then, however, its stature has steadily increased, and now it’s widely considered the best film version of Orwell’s great, still relevant book.

Have you seen In the Heights? This is the sort of question I feel compelled to ask after I’ve watched a film I consider amazing, and possibly of wide appeal. In the Heights is an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the genius behind Hamilton; and the book, as the non-singing part of a musical is called, by Quiara Alegria Hudes. The director is Jon M. Chu. It played on the big screen last year, but I wasn’t going out to see movies in theaters yet, so I saw it recently online. Oh, and another reason I’m curious if people have seen it is that in Hollywood terms, it was a flop, making significantly less money than it cost. This doesn’t usually surprise me, but In the Heights is not the usual type of film that I review.

The story concerns a group of people in the predominately Latino Washington Heights neighborhood in upper Manhattan. At the center are two couples. There’s Usnavi, played by Anthony Ramos, owner of a convenience store, or bodega as it’s called, yearning to go back to the Dominican Republic where he was born, and intending to buy his deceased father’s property there. He has a desperate crush on Vanessa, played by Melissa Barrera, who works in a beauty salon, but wants to get out of the neighborhood and become a fashion designer. Nina, played by Leslie Grace, is a brilliant young Puerto Rican woman returning to the Heights from her first year at Stanford. She felt alienated in that predominately Anglo environment, and would rather come back to live in the Heights, but her father (Jimmy Smits) expects and demands that she stay in school. Benny, played by Corey Hawkins, works for the father’s taxi company as a dispatcher, is best friends with Usnavi, and in love with Nina, supporting her in her desire to stay in New York. Around these people are many others: family, friends, and neighborhood characters.

The music is what I would call, in my relative ignorance, mainstream hip-hop inflected pop music. Anyway, this kind of music is not really my thing, but it’s a remarkable measure of quality, I think, that I find the songs lovely and quite pleasurable, both musically and lyrically. But the thing that knocked me out is the group dancing. Almost every number ends up involving the neighborhood, with a whole bunch of people singing and dancing, joyously and with great energy. The choreography, credited to Christopher Scott, is spectacular.

The film idealizes life in the neighborhood, which is something musicals do. It’s a heightened reality that we see and hear, and I found it utterly delightful. Being released during the pandemic probably hurt it more than anything, I imagine, although in general audiences today are not too crazy about musicals. Spielberg’s version of West Side Story, for instance, also didn’t get the box office that was expected.

Now, in this film there was also a bit of controversy when Washington Heights residents and others objected to the fact that, other than Benny, the important characters are not black. I don’t mean racially, but in terms of color. A vast majority of people in the Heights are black or dark brown in appearance. This complaint is understandable, especially from people who find themselves underrepresented in a film that is titled after their home. Manuel and the other filmmakers have admitted that it was an unintentional screw-up. Knowing nothing about Washington Heights, I absorbed its strong message of solidarity without a problem.

The real main character in this film is the community itself. To feel its power through outstanding songs and dance is exhilarating. If you like that feeling, In the Heights is a film for you.

After the success of the massive two-part crime film Dr. Mabuse in 1922, Fritz Lang and screenwriter Thea von Harbou, now husband and wife, embarked on an even more ambitious project, an adaptation of the German national epic Die Nibelungen. Two years were spent in preparation, and shooting took nine months, which was a huge amount of time to make a film in those days.

Once again, the result was a two-part film. Part One (Siegfried) tells of the warrior Siegfried’s wooing of the Burgundian princess Kriemhild, his services to her brother King Gunther in winning the warrior queen Brunhild, and his betrayal and death through the spite of Brunhild and the machinations of the King’s favorite knight, Hagen. Part Two (Kriemhild’s Revenge) tells of Kriemhild’s marriage to the barbarian king Etzel, and how she lures her brothers and Hagen to her court in Hungary in order to exact a bloody revenge for the death of Siegfried.

Those familiar with the 12th century poem will notice that the film is almost totally faithful to its source. With only minor added dramatic flourishes, Lang and von Harbou succeeded in transforming the entire story, with its major and minor characters, into a magnificent visual spectacle. Most importantly, the picture recreates the awesome, elemental feeling of the epic, through an astonishing production design and a brilliant dramatic and visual strategy emphasizing the story’s mythic elements through monumentalism and highly stylized acting.

The two parts combined have a running time of almost five hours, but the movie is never dull. At this point, Lang knew how to tell a story primarily through images—gone are the lengthy intertitles that plagued Dr. Mabuse. The huge sets have an abstract quality that aids the picture’s mythic, timeless mood. Every scene is carefully composed to convey a particular spatial sense. It’s amazing how Lang is able to make the material dramatic without ever shrinking the characters into mere individuals who have motives or psychology. These are larger-than-life emblems of human passion and struggle, and yet the film’s dynamism maintains its spell, keeping the action gripping and involving. The actors were somehow coaxed into performances that matched their gigantic surroundings. Best is Margarete Schön as Kriemhild, especially in her later incarnation as avenging angel, when she is positively scary.

Die Nibelungen has had a controversial reputation among film critics and historians, some of whom see it as an example of a “fascist” style in filmmaking. But this is a tragic story where greed and envy lead to crime, which then leads to a cycle of vengeance that destroys everyone—hardly the celebration of victory that a nationalist ideology would be looking for. This film is truly one of the most impressive achievements of the silent era—an unforgettable, spellbinding experience.

French writer-director Céline Sciamma has followed up her big success from 2019, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with a surprising story of childhood, called Petite Maman. Sometimes simplicity is a radical choice, and Sciamma, who is fond of exploring new frontiers in feminist cinema, presents a vision of young girls and mothers with a sense of beauty and rightness that seems almost too easy, until you stop to consider the delicate artistry that it took to make the film.

We first see eight-year-old Nellie helping an old lady with a crossword puzzle. When the girl leaves the room, we see that she’s in a nursing home. As she passes a couple of rooms she says goodbye to the women living in them. In the fourth room is her mother, packing everything up. Only later does it occur to us that the lady in the first scene was Nelly’s grandmother, whom she was named after. Sciamma has telescoped the time scheme and now the grandmother has recently died. The mother, Marion, is stricken and quiet with grief.

They go to the grandmother’s old house in the country to join Nelly’s father, who is helping Marion clean up the house and pack everything up. Marion grew up in this house. She finds old notebooks with writings from when she was a girl. Nelly wants to know what it was like then, and her mother tells her a few things, including the story of a little hut she built in the nearby woods where she would go sometimes. But the grief makes her pretty closed mouth about the past right now. Nelly asks her father if he knew about the hut, but he says Marion never told him.

Then, mysteriously, one morning, the mother has gone away, without saying goodbye, leaving Nelly alone in the house with her father. His explanation is that she just needed to be alone for awhile.

Later, wandering in the nearby woods by herself, Nelly sees a little girl dragging a rather large tree branch. Silently, she helps the girl drag the branch further into the woods, and lo and behold, there are the beginnings of a hut. The strange girl, who looks a great deal like Nelly, invites her to her house nearby. When they get to the gate leading to the little yard, Nelly sees that the house looks exactly the same as the house she just came from. The indoors has the same plan and features too. “What’s your name?” she asks the other girl. “Marion,” she says.

Is what we think is happening here actually happening? The fairy tale-like  concept is so simple that I resisted it at first. In fact, Sciamma does not resort to any magic formula. The only spell, really, is Nelly’s desire to know what her mother’s girlhood was like. Sure enough, at the new house she meets the girl’s mother who is named Nelly and has a limp just like her  grandmother did. But the point of all this is not to dazzle us with any Twilight Zone-type effects. Instead everything is very plain, straightforward, and matter of fact.

Much of the film’s beauty is attributable to the two child actresses, who are sisters, Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz. They are serious and thoughtful, even when playing together. Sciamma has elicited utterly natural performances from them. The idea, the film’s point, if you will, is felt intuitively, and represents a deep connection that a girl has with her mother, in this case a loving mother, and the need to bond with the girl the mother used to be. And it’s also very much about girls’ relationships with other girls. Beautifully shot and edited, with a brilliant sound design and color scheme, Petite Maman is a blissfully moving experience.

The amazing advancements in cinematic technology in recent decades include cameras and sound equipment that can give us sound and image close-up from a long distance, as well as small and portable devices for ground level shots. One of the benefits of these new tools is the ability to make films about animals that eliminate interference from the presence of humans to a remarkable degree. Nothing I’ve seen exemplifies this advantage better than Gunda, a film by Russian director Victor Kossakovsky, released in 2020.

Gunda is the name of a large and impressive looking sow with a litter of twelve piglets, that we see living in a farm environment. The movie doesn’t tell us that that’s her name, but I learned it from reading about the film later. In fact, there is no narration in Gunda, no explanatory text, no music, no language or voices, no human beings at all. For the entire film, at least before the end credits, we only observe Gunda and her litter, as well as some free range chickens and cows. The gorgeously crisp photography is in black and white. In my view, black and white more vividly conveys subjective states. Whether or not that was the reason for using it, black and white suits the film’s message perfectly.

In the long opening sequence, the mother pig sleeps, and gradually we see the piglets emerging from behind her in the doorway of her open pen. The process begins by which the little ones feed from their mother’s milk. There are enough nipples for all of them, but it takes time for each adorable baby to find one, as they crawl on top and between one another. We are at ground or eye level with them, as we are for most of the film, not looking down at them from a human point of view, but right in there among them. The time for animals is at a different pace than what we have accustomed ourselves to. The mother wakes up, shifts her body, helps the babies to access her as best she can, and it takes time, time for the experience of being an animal.

Later we observe chickens, released from a cage by an offscreen presence slowly emerging into a field with woods where they slowly and very carefully explore the terrain. They too, have the force of personality, the character of beings purposely seeking their needs. One of the chickens gets around on only one leg, and quite well, I must say. Later, Kossakovsky shows us a herd of cows. We look in their eyes, observe their interactions with one another, including helping to swat away flies with their tails, and they too display their personhood.

The Lakota speak of animals as people: for example, the “four-legged people” or the “winged people.” That’s what this film does as well. We are made to see these beings’ lives as sufficient and meaningful, apart from any consideration of how they could be of use to us. When we return to Gunda and her litter, the piglets have gotten bigger and more playful as she leads them around the yard. I said before that there are no humans. Towards the end, we do see a large farm vehicle drive up, but we don’t see the people driving it. The movie doesn’t show us animals being slaughtered or treated cruelly, and we don’t hear that either. Yet the film, and especially the ending, has an unforgettable impact. With pure visuals it makes the best case against eating animals I’ve ever seen. Gunda is a beautiful work that conveys to us, without any preaching, the absolute unity of life.

French director Mia Hansen-Løve is a real cinephile. She loves to think and talk about film history and the works of famous filmmakers. Although she’s partly of Danish heritage, she grew up in France. Even so, she’s been influenced, like so many others, by the films of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Like him, she often examines relationships between the sexes, and conflicts in personal life. Unlike Bergman, her films generally avoid heightened dramatic events. Instead she focuses steadily on everyday life, and the ordinary changes occurring in people’s emotions and viewpoints over time. She also likes to portray the inner lives of women, although not exclusively.

This comparison and contrast with Bergman has resulted in her latest film, entitled Bergman Island. It concerns two screenwriters, who also happen to be a couple, Chris and Tony, played by Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth. They’ve decided to visit Fårö, the island off the coast of Sweden where Bergman had lived, renting a little house and hoping that being there for a few weeks will inspire them to finish their separate screenplays. Hansen-Løve and her two lead actors deftly portray the mundane details of getting used to a new vacation place, with Roth in particular showing how relaxed and believably casual a performer he can be. They decide to watch a Bergman film, settling on Cries and Whispers, and the experience, as you might expect if you’re familiar with that movie, is intense. Krieps’s character, Chris, is especially conflicted. She comprehends the great artistry, but doesn’t really like the way Bergman portrays women. As the film goes on, we start to understand that Hansen-Løve intends to present us with an alternative version of how women might more realistically behave than in a Bergman film. It’s a clever strategy in which she honors the famous director while criticizing him through her own different stylistic choices. But soon it stops being a commentary on Bergman and goes in its own direction.

The film’s centerpiece occurs when she asks Tony to listen to her ideas about where to go with her screenplay. As she narrates, we are taken to a film within the film, starring Mia Wasikowska as a filmmaker who runs into an old lover on Fårö that she broke up with long ago and had children with someone else, but then finds the sparks flying between them again. Where does life end and art begin? Of course there are echoes of Chris’s relationship with Tony, hints of trouble in their intimacy, but the correspondence is not exact.

There’s quite a bit of humor around the way Bergman has been commodified on the island. Roth’s character even goes on what they call a “Bergman safari,” a bus tour to various sites of Bergman films. This is a real thing. Hansen-Løve’s sly regard for the commercialized aspect of film is endearing. Her movie, Bergman Island, is more than just a treat for cinephiles, though; it’s a provocative look at the way women could be, should be portrayed in film, and preferably by women directors. It’s both a challenge and a delight.

The latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson shows the writer-director returning to a favorite place and time: southern California in the 1970s. Boogie Nights in ’97, and more recently, Inherent Vice in 2014, celebrated that unusual period in humorous, gently satiric ways. The new movie is called Licorice Pizza, and in some ways, it’s Anderson’s most outright comic film.

In his screen debut, Cooper Hoffman plays 15-year-old aspiring actor Gary Valentine, a high school student in the San Fernando Valley in 1973. He’s a goofy red-headed kid, a little overweight, who for some reason has developed amazing self-confidence. He thinks he’s going somewhere, and he’s full of ideas about how to get there. On the day when class pictures are being taken at the school, he sees a young woman, a photographer’s assistant named Alana Kane, played by the similarly named Alana Haim, also in her first film. Gary is immediately love-struck, and decides that Alana is going to be his girlfriend someday, and he quite boldly tells her this. She brushes him off and says she’s 25, too old for him, but this awkward yet assertive girl with a wise guy attitude is secretly flattered by Gary’s devotion. They do become friends, and work together on Gary’s schemes, including one in which he tries to get in on the recent waterbed craze. But the friendship is founded on her stubborn insistence, and eventually his as well, that they’re not really a couple at all.

Now, one of the characteristics of Anderson’s films is that he doesn’t care about social proprieties. He likes to makes film about subjects that other people avoid, such as the pornography industry, weird cults, gambling, drugs, you name it. In this case it isn’t at all clear to me that Alana is 25. She says she is, but she lives with her parents and sisters, and her father treats her like a teenager. Be that as it may, the director is interested in the dynamic of an absurdly confident boy falling for an older girl. And this is a personal work for him. Cooper Hoffman, who’s actually 18, is the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, a close friend of Anderson’s who appeared in five of his movies. Alana Haim is a musician in a group with her sisters, that is called Haim. Anderson is a fan and has previously directed several of their music videos.

Anderson’s humor goes on some strange tangents, not all of which work, but the picture is as good as it is primarily because of Alana Haim. Her character is clearly immature, but she plays at being grown up with complete conviction, while her unacknowledged needs are always leaking through. It’s a marvelous performance, consistently funny and engaging. Haim carries the movie with apparent ease.

The picture has a kind of splashy “anything goes” style, with Anderson’s signature sweeping camera movements and great use of background music. There are good parts for some familiar people: Sean Penn, Tom Waits, and especially Bradley Cooper, insanely funny as an unhinged film producer. But most of all, watch the film for Alana Haim. She’s the real deal.

Oh, and about that title: “Licorice pizza” was SoCal slang for a vinyl record, and it became the name of a popular chain of LA-area record stores. The film doesn’t tell us any of this. I had to Google it to find out. But I think Anderson named his film Licorice Pizza as a way to sum up the ‘70s in his home state. Like the film, it’s an affectionate joke.

I’m always interested when a film about a favorite rock band comes out. The Velvet Underground, a documentary about the group that enjoyed brief but unprofitable fame in the 1960s, has the added advantage of coming from a favorite director, Todd Haynes. And, I was not disappointed.

The story begins with two musical artists toiling in relative obscurity. Lou Reed, a Jewish kid from Long Island who played in a doo-wop band in high school, and wrote songs while at college in Syracuse, had started taking drugs in his teens. He’d been in a psych hospital at one point, and his songs reflected dark themes of alienation, addiction, and bisexuality. Then there was John Cale, a young composer and multi-instrumentalist from Wales, who traveled to New York City to be part of the downtown music scene, and met Reed when the latter was working as a songwriter for a recording company. Cale’s experimental style mixed well with Reed’s dark songwriting. They added Reed’s college friend Sterling Morrison on guitar, and Maureen Tucker, the sister of another Syracuse friend, on drums, and called themselves The Velvet Underground.

They were playing in a bar when someone who knew Andy Warhol saw them. Warhol came himself to listen, and put some of his cultural weight in to give them more attention. Later, when a beautiful singer and model from Germany with the stage name “Nico” showed up at Warhol’s art factory, he persuaded the Velvet Underground to make her a part of the group. They recorded an album on Verve Records, with Warhol’s painting of a banana on the cover, and then Warhol had them tour with a light show in 1966 and ’67, these shows becoming legendary as the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” This was the beginning. The film covers the entire eight years of their career.

There are excerpts from interviews, including some from group members who are now deceased, and those accompany a lot of historical footage of the group. And all this is quite standard for a documentary, but Haynes presents the film in a style that simulates the New York avant-garde cinema of the 60s, and especially that of Andy Warhol.

Haynes uses lots of split screen, sometimes with footage in one section and interview material on the other, but often with more than two sections in the split, and a constant swirling visual effect, mixing painting, sound, photographs, and talk, which strongly evokes the period of the 1960s and early ‘70s, in which the story took place. We learn a lot about Warhol’s methods and the people in his orbit. We learn about Nico walking away to do other things eventually. We learn how the chemistry between Reed and Cale went badleading to Cale’s exit and Reed’s refashioning of the group. And all this is conveyed by Haynes’ uncompromisingly flamboyant style. Any movie about the group with this material would be good, but this wild aesthetic form adds immeasurably, I think, to the film’s power.

At the time, the Velvet Underground only had a cult following. In the era of peace, love, hippies, and pot, their songs about the underclass and urban angst, and harder drugs like heroin, were not a best-seller. But years later, after Reed had made a successful solo career, these early albums became enormously influential in rock music, and remain so to this day. Now we have the film The Velvet Underground, and it gives us a satisfying taste of what it was really like to be there.

An evil eye changes the appearance of two young people in love so that they can’t recognize one another, in a film from the country of Georgia that reveals the world of myth and folklore underlying everyday life.

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? This intriguing and ambiguous question is the title of a new film from Georgia (the country), in which complex levels of meaning are designed to convey a love story in all its simplicity. It’s written and directed by Aleksandre Koberidze, and it seems fitting that the title is an open-ended question, since he is clearly open to as many aspects of ordinary life in a Georgian city as he can be. The central narrative is about a young woman, Lisa, and a young man, Giorgi, who meet by chance on a street and fall in love on first sight. They find one another again that evening, and arrange to meet later and talk at a certain place, forgetting to tell each other their names.

At this point we discover that Koberidze sees the reality of everyday life overlaid, as it were, with dimensions of myth, folk belief, and folk tale. But if you’re expecting what we’ve come to call magical realism, this film offers something different. In the modern era we’ve largely shut the realm of folklore out of our lives, to the point where the word myth has come to mean false, but Koberidze is telling us that it’s just about different ways of looking at things, and that metaphor is a vehicle for whatever meanings we seek and find in life. We are introduced to this through an old-fashioned method: a narrator who tells the story of what’s going on while we’re watching.

And so, the narrator tells us, unbeknownst to Lisa and Giorgi, an unknown force, an evil eye, has put a curse on both of them. They wake up the next morning with completely different appearances than they had before. In the film, we see new, different actors playing them. Because of this, when they go to their prearranged and unfortunately crowded place to meet again, they can’t find or recognize one another. They each know that they’ve changed, but it doesn’t occur to them that the other has changed as well.

Now, this sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone. But the way the film presents it, it’s just another problem in life to be dealt with somehow. The seemingly supernatural change is really just a metaphorical challenge: how much do we define ourselves and others by appearance? If we’re truly in love, shouldn’t we able to know each other without being guided by the physical? Well, no, actually. And it’s complicated by the fact that they’ve changed in other ways. Lisa, a pharmacist, has lost her medical knowledge and must find a new job. Giorgi, a footballer, can’t play well anymore, but he remains a fan. The permutations of this hide-and-seek scenario continue to gently undulate throughout the movie.

In the meantime we discover the real subject of the film, the experience of daily life for folks in the city. Koberidze’s camera follows a host of different people as they go about their business, with a special emphasis on children. Appreciate the now moment, the film seems to be saying, because that’s all there really is. In addition, the elements of storytelling are shaken and spilled into many forms. We see a host of techniques, like a playful lesson in cinematic style: realism, fantasy, slow cinema, real time, offbeat editing, slow motion, and the use of music to color scenes in radical ways. The narrator talking to us while we see silent action, and dialogue printed in intertitles, almost brings us back to square one of film history.

The best symbolism doesn’t explain everything, but casts a spell that can lead to many places, so in this strange and lovely movie, as we ask What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? the answers will reveal more about ourselves than we thought.

Bernard Shaw wrote over sixty plays in his long career, most of which were intended as provocations to the conventional wisdom of the time. Arguably his most popular play was Pygmalion, written in 1913. I assume that many of you know about it, but I can safely say that the vast majority of people are more familiar with a musical based on it called My Fair Lady.

The story concerns Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics who can tell where anyone in England is from, just from their accent. Encountering a rude Cockney flower seller named Eliza Doolittle, he makes a bet with a friend that he can train Eliza to talk like a noble lady, and pass her off as one in society. Promising her a more affluent situation, he takes her into his home, and the resulting conflict between the two constitutes the main body of the story.

Now, as entertaining as My Fair Lady is, being a musical means that it romanticized its source and softened the content. The play was a biting satire on social class and snobbery. Its title comes from a Greek myth in which a sculptor named Pygmalion falls in love with one of his statues, and it comes to life. So a central theme here is the foolishness of a man like Higgins, who molds the outside of a woman to be what he wants, but never really understands or appreciates her as a person.

Pygmalion was made into a film in 1938, starring Leslie Howard as Higgins and a relative newcomer, Wendy Hiller, as Eliza. It was directed by Anthony Asquith, and Leslie Howard, who was passionate about this role, also acted as the film’s co-director. A team of fine screenwriters adapted the play under the supervision of Shaw himself. The result is an absolute delight, one of the universally acknowledged masterpieces of British cinema.

Wendy Hiller was chosen by Shaw because she had played the role on the stage. She’s a perfect Eliza, a coarse guttersnipe whose contrast with the sophisticated Higgins is a delicious comedy in itself.

Now, I know some who don’t think much of Leslie Howard because of his weak performance in Gone with the Wind, made a year later. But Pygmalion shows him at his best, superbly conveying his character’s self-assurance and charisma. Higgins’ mean side is not concealed—the arrogance of the upper class mentality is one of the main points of the play—but at the same time, Shaw’s dialogue for him makes him a compelling critic of the society of which he’s a part. Howard dominates the film almost like Higgins dominates Eliza, but the brilliance of the play lies in how Eliza confounds expectations with her native cleverness.

Howard and Hiller are a sensational couple on screen. We’ve gotten used to assuming that Professor Higgins will fall for his creation, just like in the Pygmalion myth. But whatever you can say about Bernard Shaw, he was never sentimental. The play goes against our expectations. The film, however, manages to play it both ways in its touching, satisfying, and believable ending. Pygmalion is a movie treasure that I can’t do without.

An undesirable side-effect of watching lots of Hollywood movies is that we become used to films that try for big, splashy effects—blockbusters and self-important message films, full of noise and drama. We’re not used to smaller scale modest efforts; we have trouble noticing subtlety and nuance. The films of Korean director Hong Sang-soo tend to fly under the mainstream radar. But there’s hidden treasure here.

His latest picture is called The Woman Who Ran. We meet Gam-hee, a married woman played by the warmly expressive Kim Min-hee. Since she got married, she’s never spent a day apart from her husband, but now he’s on a business trip, and she travels to Seoul to visit some old friends. Her friend Young-soon is divorced, living in an apartment complex with a roommate. They have a garden and some chickens, and Young-soon is mostly content with her life. The dinner conversation ranges widely, from the trials of getting older to philosophical subjects. At one point, the roommate describes how the rooster they have jumps on the backs of hens, pecking at them mercilessly, just to show, according to her, that he’s important. This small detail is part of a larger pattern in which women acknowledge men and relationships as problematic.

Gam-hee then stays with another friend in town, a Pilates instructor still trying to find her vocation in life. Their conversation is a bit more guarded, but also revealing. The friend is having an affair with a married man, a fact that emphasizes her tenuous self-image. Then, by chance, Gam-hee runs into the wife of an artist that she herself used to be with. Although the possibility of regret is in the air, the two are able to talk about their situations as grown-ups, and when the husband shows up, it’s not really a surprise to find that he’s kind of a clueless and self-centered guy.

Hong is a master of the “ordinary.” He can take the merest wisp of a story and create a gentle naturalistic slice-of-life movie like this. His editing flow and relaxed narrative rhythm are as comfortable as a well-worn pair of sandals, and I think this opens up the possibility for viewers of insight into the characters in particular, and questions about happiness in general. What does it mean for each woman? And how is it affected by living in what we are used to calling a “man’s world”? The title, The Woman Who Ran, refers apparently to someone mentioned in one of the conversations, a minor character, whom we never see, and whose actions pose a question that is never answered. Then again, I think it points obliquely to Gam-hee herself, who escapes temporarily from the security of married life to learn about herself by checking in with friends from her past.

28 feature films in 25 years. That’s the astonishingly prolific career of Hong Sang-soo. He writes and directs movie like Stephen King writes books, although in all other respects their work is very different. Hong can do this because he doesn’t try to please anyone but himself with his low-key, intelligent, personal dramas about people interacting with one another in ordinary settings. The relationships of men and women are always one of the subjects, painted in shades of uncertainty. The Woman Who Ran is one of his more inspired artistic efforts, direct and simple, yet thought-provoking. For Hong, and for those who enjoy his movies, less is definitely more.

Movies about music festivals have a built-in appeal: if you like the kind of music featured, the festival film gives you a variety of different artists in that genre. The gold standard is still Monterey Pop, about the 1967 festival of that name. And of course, there’s Woodstock, chronicling the famous gathering in 1969 that was seen as a kind of summing up of the rock and pop music then. Now, just last year, a film was released about a major music festival that took place the same summer when Woodstock was happening. It was the Harlem Cultural Festival, a free event that occurred at Mount Morris Park on six successive weekends from June to August of ’69. This did not get very much attention. I, for one, had never heard of it. The film is called Summer of Soul, and my jaw dropped when I saw the list of performers. But first you need to know that Summer of Soul is also a record of a crucial time in the history of the Black community in America, and the production was put together by Ahmir Thompson, more popularly known as Questlove, a major author and producer, and one of the frontmen for the band The Roots, which is The Tonight Show band.

Each weekend in the Harlem Cultural Festival highlighted a different type of Black American music. In the course of the film, we watch performances by B.B. King, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Chambers Brothers, and David Ruffin, the lead singer for The Temptations who had just left that group to go solo. We see The Fifth Dimension performing there as well, and two of the members of that group talk about how excited they were to play in Harlem, because their sound was sometimes dismissed as “too white,” but the film showcases their stunning vocal mastery. The jazz portions include Herbie Mann, Abbey Lincoln, and Nina Simone. And a very interesting long middle section shows the strong influence of gospel on the Black music scene, with performances by The Staple Singers, The Edwin Hawkins singers with “Oh Happy Day,” and the Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson.

Interspersed with all the great music are clips and interviews profiling the social and political situation in Black America at that time. Dr. King had been murdered only the previous year, and there was a new militancy in the air. Civil rights and social justice were part of the festival, and we are shown a very young Jesse Jackson speaking to the audience about the need to continue the struggle for peace and justice. Interviews with artists and people involved in putting the festival on emphasize the strong sense of togetherness experienced at these events. In such an atmosphere of joy and hope, it is somewhat difficult for us now, over five decades later, not to feel some frustration at how much racism has continued as a political force in our country. But the people being interviewed caution us against despair. The love and solidarity, expressed through music and activism, is still alive today, as we see, for instance, in the Black Lives Matter movement.

So why did it take so long for this film to be released? One of the sponsors of the festival, Maxwell House Coffee, filmed all the performances. But after being minimally aired on a couple of TV specials, the footage ended up sitting in a basement for fifty years until it was discovered by an archivist in 2004 who alerted others to take on the task of restoration. Now, thanks to them and to Questlove, this brilliant event has come to life again in Summer of Soul. You owe it to yourself to see it.

Wes Anderson has a style that is decidedly his own and no one else’s. Those of us who follow his work are familiar with his toy-like production design, bright colors, block-like movements and set ups, eccentric stories and characters, and obsession with detail. His latest is called The French Dispatch, which is the name of a fictional weekly magazine, a foreign affairs supplement to an American newspaper in Kansas, of all places. The Dispatch itself, however, is published in a small French town, and edited by a grouchy, avuncular oddball played by Bill Murray. This is all just a framing story. The movie itself is presented as if it were an issue of this magazine, with an introduction, three feature articles, and an end note. The lightness of the premise, in a story anthology form instead of the usual long single narrative, allows more freedom for Anderson’s silliness. We know that he loves silliness, but here he really doubles down on his comic view of human beings and their struggles. I think it takes courage to be this silly, this willing to throw caution and plot believability to the winds in the service of laughter.

The three main sections are in black-and-white. I think it was a kind of dare to do this, to demonstrate that Anderson (and his longtime cinematographer Leonard Yeoman) can achieve striking beauty without color. The black-and-white puts a new emphasis on Anderson’s sense of pattern and space. This version of the world as a series of mazes and tunnels, to be observed through windows and precarious angles, becomes more striking without the distraction of color. On the other hand, the surrounding sections that are in color evoke a crucial difference between the printed word and the people creating it.

The first story is about an outsider artist, played by Benicio del Toro, creating his paintings in prison, who is discovered by an art dealer and impresario played by Adrien Brody, desperately and hilariously trying to promote the work, and himself. In the second story, Frances McDormand is a Dispatch writer who finds herself more intimately involved in the drama of a Paris youth movement headed by a young rebel (Timothée Chalamet) than she should be. The third features Jeffrey Wright, imitating the mannerisms of James Baldwin, as a food critic doing a piece on a chef, who instead ends up in the middle of a kidnapping story involving the son of a police commissioner played by Mathieu Almaric. All three stories reveal unexpected depths of meaning and rueful wisdom about life’s hard knocks.

The Dispatch is clearly meant to be a goofy tribute to The New Yorker, the American magazine with a long and storied literary influence. Anderson loves to make fun of the craft of writing, and the pretensions that always come to the fore, but it is an affectionate ridicule, which conveys a longing for the days when journalism was braver and more lively. I think he also loves the idea of having his own acting troupe—the picture is so full of famous actors that it can be distracting at times—oh look, there’s Henry Winkler, or Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, and many others in small parts. But it’s all part of the game. The French Dispatch may not be Wes Anderson’s best film, but it’s possibly his most playful.

The Worst Person in the World. Now, there’s a title that will get your attention. But this new film from Norwegian director Joachim Trier is named ironically. It’s not a portrait of an evil person at all, but of someone who is set up by the world she lives in to blame herself for everything.

Julie, a medical student played by the excellent Renate Reinsve, suddenly realizes that she doesn’t want to be a doctor after all, but would rather study the mind, in other words, become a psychologist. Then she changes her mind again and says she will pursue photography. As an audience, we might be tempted to see her as flaky, but the film makes us see that this kind of wavering is normal for someone in their 20s, especially someone in the upper middle class. The one element that does disturb Julie’s focus is romance. Once again, normal. She loves the initial very blissful stage of connection with an attractive man, and of course this element includes sex, a pleasure that we all know is powerful. The subtle point we’re made to realize is that the unspoken but real male social dominance makes it harder for women to navigate career and romance, and the one aspect the film beautifully portrays is how relationships inevitably become about the man’s thoughts, desires, and overall narratives; automatically relegating women to a supporting role. This all might sound rather dry when I describe it, but Trier and his screenwriter, Eskil Vogt, weave a remarkably observant portrait of people trying to navigate the rules of the game, and Reinsve’s performance is a constant revelation of female intelligence, desire, and frustration.

Julie gets into a relationship with a well-known artist who is fifteen years her senior. The enjoyment of each other’s company is genuine, but she ends up feeling like a spectator of her own life. She eventually cheats on him with a married man she meets at a wedding reception that she’s crashed, but rather than take this plot development for granted, the film beautifully conveys the gradual stages, from initial flirting while feeling a sense of taboo, to final acceptance of the need to be together, the peak being a long brilliant sequence in which everyone in the world stops in a freeze-frame while Julie runs through all these stationary figures to see her new lover.

But we know—and this is another clever thing—that the same contradictions will arise again. When I thought about the film’s clear-eyed view of patriarchy, I considered opening this review by saying, “What if Woody Allen were a feminist?” But that’s actually selling this movie short. Yes, it’s written and directed by men, and it doesn’t have a radical style, but I rarely see films in which the intricacies of love, sex, and relationships in a male-dominated world, are so finely and compassionately exposed. The men in the film are not depicted as bad people, even though we know such men exist. Instead, everyone in this story is well-meaning, trying their best, but it’s the unconscious assumptions and unspoken rules that are driving everything.

The ads and previews try to tell us that this is a romantic comedy. Well, OK, but if so, it’s the least consoling rom-com I’ve ever seen. It’s frequently funny, but there are no jokes or gags. The humor springs from anxiety and loss. The Worst Person in the World, with its mocking title and lovely main character, may seem light-hearted on the surface, but it carries the weight of disappointed dreams.

For decades I’ve been enjoying and writing about the films of English director Mike Leigh: Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, these are just a few examples. But it was only recently that I watched his breakthrough film, the movie that essentially brought him to the attention of the world, from 1988: High Hopes. It seems to me that High Hopes provides something of a key to Leigh’s work.

Cyril and Shirley are a leftist working class couple living in London, and getting by on low wage jobs. Cyril, played by Phil Davis, is a Marxist intellectual who’s become embittered about the possibility of change in the era of Margaret Thatcher. Shirley, played by Ruth Sheen, shares his radical orientation, but she is more practical, more positive, and very funny. They are good caring people who sometimes quarrel like most couples. Cyril’s elderly mother, played by Edna Doré, lives in her own flat and seems permanently depressed, her cognitive abilities and energy clearly at a low ebb. Cyril and Shirley try to be helpful to his mom, but she tends to resist help. Cyril’s sister Valerie, played with manic intensity by Heather Tobias, puts on a big show of loving their mom and doing nice things for her, but her constant annoying giggle fails to conceal her unacknowledged rage. She’s married to a cynical and abusive used car salesman, a real creep named Martin, played by Philip Jackson.

These are the five main characters, but there are others with scenes that are funny and significant. The mother’s next-door neighbors become involved when she locks herself out of her flat. These neighbors are hilariously clueless upper class twits played by Lesley Manville and David Bamber. They temporarily take over the film.

One of the things this movie made me realize is that even though Leigh’s characters tend to be “oddballs” and eccentrics, and the minor ones are often outrageous (but funny) caricatures, they all look more like people I know or see in everyday life than the sanitized, superficially flattering versions of ourselves that we see in most films and TV. In Hollywood terms, Ruth Sheen, for instance, looks awkward and ungainly, but she is the one performer in the film that you will remember most of all, because she plays such a genuine good person. After awhile you lose that initial awkward impression and accept her and her pleasant looks like you would real people you might know.

As in many of Leigh’s films, High Hopes is centered on working class issues. The frantic yuppie Valerie and her craven husband represent the emptiness of consumer society, and the upper class twits are utterly self-centered. But the movie doesn’t idealize the central couple. Cyril feels too powerless and disgusted to stay involved in activism. And he rejects Shirley’s desire to have a baby because the world is too corrupt to raise a child in. This conflict between them, which keeps recurring, happens within a real loving relationship, so it doesn’t break them. But it’s poignant. The plight of the elderly mother evokes some deep sadness. Why her life has disappointed her we never learn completely, although there are clues. But Leigh takes the time to present the chaos in her insane family from the old lady’s point of view, and it is tremendously moving.

The writing is witty and thoughtful, and it should be noted that, as in all Leigh’s films, the actors helped write their own dialogue. It’s rare also to see an essentially comic film have an impact as a good domestic drama as well. High Hopes is fresh and raw, maybe not as smooth as some of his later films, but I just love it. It sums up a lot of what I love not only about this director, but about how great film can be.

We first meet Ruth, played by Jessica Barden, as she helps her brother Blaze collect cans from dumpsters which they then sell to the local junkyard. But it’s not enough. When she gets home, there’s an eviction notice on their door, which Ruth pulls off and hides underneath a pot with all the previous ones. She’s a senior in high school whose struggle to survive makes her late for class when she actually does show up. Her older brother, played by Gus Halper, is protective. Despite their desperate situation, he’s determined that Ruth will go to college, and he is proud when she gets an acceptance letter. But his sister blows it off. She says they can’t afford tuition, but the truth is she doesn’t want to abandon Blaze, one of those guys trying to carry the world on his shoulders.

Their mom got addicted to pain pills after she injured herself at the factory, and is basically detoxing in jail. Desperate, they accept an offer from the junkyard owner to work on his crew breaking into warehouses and factories and stealing scrap metal. Copper fetches a high price, and other metals are worth good money too, so now Blaze and Ruth can make and even save some cash, but always at the risk of getting busted.

Riegel writes about what she knows—she comes from the Ohio rustbelt, and the story of Ruth trying to find a way out is largely autobiographical. The film expertly evokes the real working class world of low-paying factory and retail jobs. The time is late December, early January. It’s cold, the sky is overcast, and the light often has a bluish tinge in Holler’s frequent afternoon and evening scenes. Riegel doesn’t indulge in what has come to be called “miserablism,” however, trying to make everything seem as terrible as possible. There’s enough suffering to go around, but as in real life there are moments of closeness, humor, even joy. We meet some of their friends at the frozen foods plant, whose support for one another is a relief from the indifference of the plant owner and the local cops.

Jessica Barden, who you’d never guess is a British actress, is a winning presence as Ruth. She can be really funny with wisecracking insults, but there’s still a vulnerability there that attracts other characters, even the sleazy junkyard owner, a long-haired beer drinking tough guy dealing drugs on the side. But as you might expect, the whole business with stealing scrap metal is not as safe and secure as promised. Most of all, the underlying insecurity of life on the edge in white working class America is a constant. The corporate economic system benefitting rich people who live far away from this little town frames everything and everyone in a confining dead-end narrative. Holler doesn’t offer us glib answers or easy resolutions. Ruth’s life seems real and immediate; the environment Riegel has created around her is vivid, detailed, and honest.

This part of Ohio is actually the northern tip of the Appalachians, and “holler” is a distortion of the word “hollow,” describing a valley, and really a kind of life. Holler, the film, as it happens, also represents a shout, a cry for freedom.

Almodóvar’s latest explores the ambiguities of motherhood, while also spotlighting the issue of memory in the Spanish Civil War.

Spanish writer and director Pedro Almodóvar’s previous film from 2019, Pain and Glory, was a triumph that to many seemed like a summing up of his entire career. Rather than trying to top that somehow, his new movie, Parallel Mothers, covers ground that by now is pretty familiar to those of us who follow his work, but at the same time, through a bit of artful misdirection, ventures into new territory.

Penélope Cruz plays Janis Martinez, a successful Madrid photographer in her late 30s. As the film opens, she’s doing a photo shoot for a magazine article about a forensic anthropologist named Arturo. After the shoot, she asks him for a favor. Her great-grandfather was shot by the fascists in 1936, during the Spanish civil war, and buried in an unmarked grave along with several other people from her home town. Her family and the people of the town want the grave exhumed so that the bodies can get proper burials, but the government is dragging its feet. Could Arturo use his influence to expedite the matter? He promises to try. They get together for drinks, and one thing naturally leading to another, they go to bed, although he’s a married man.

Cut to nine months later. Janis is pregnant; in the birth center she rooms with a pregnant teenage girl named Ana, played by Milena Smit, whom she helps get through her fears about giving birth. Ana’s mother is an ambitious and self-absorbed actress about to get her first break in the theater, leaving Madrid just when her daughter needs her most, and so Janis becomes something of a big sister to Ana. Both births are successful, and they both have daughters. But then, when Arturo visits to see the baby, he makes a comment that enrages Janis but also plants a seed of doubt in her mind about his paternity, and she begins to suspect that the babies got mixed up somehow at the hospital.

Almodóvar has always loved to take themes and motifs from romances, pulp fiction, or soap operas, and use them to deal with themes that are dear to him. The idea of babies that are accidentally switched at birth is really one of the soapiest of plot devices you can think of, although it also has roots in the comic tradition going back all the way to ancient Roman drama. In this case, the plot is a way for Almodóvar to explore motherhood, a constant obsession in his films, and in this case also the relationships between mothers, and how they can be painful or fruitful depending on the decisions they make. Janis’s decision is to bring Ana closer to her by hiring her as her live-in-maid and babysitter.

Now, the interest here, despite how it may look, is not in the outlandish situation, but in the character of two women, the brave but emotionally conflicted Janis, and the immature, mixed-up, but intrepid teenage mother Ana. The young Milena Smit is a compelling presence in the film, and a good match of opposites with Penélope Cruz. Cruz, on the other hand, so perfectly embodies her role that she seems almost like a medium for Almodóvar’s intimate notions and issues. Thus the title, Parallel Mothers. The women are different, but their lives are parallel and work best together. Or as a t-shirt says that Janis wears, “We should all be feminists.”

But wait. Just like the babies getting switched, so Almodóvar performs a switcheroo on us. As we near the end of the film, the sub-plot about exhuming the civil war grave in Janis’s town takes center stage. This is a theme right out of the news: Spain is now going through yet more pain and controversy around the war in the ‘30s that ended with a fascist victory. Relatives of the many people shot by Franco’s army are demanding that the mass graves be exhumed, while those who want to forget the past and sweep it under the rug are resisting. The two strands of narrative now combine, and although I don’t think this development is completely successful, the picture is still a solid effort by Almodóvar, who is taking a stand for the importance of memory in Spain, and for exposing the wounds of the war rather than hiding them. The movie, so centered on mothers and family, concludes on the moving note of grief and honor by the families of those whose lives were unjustly taken. Parallel Mothers makes a connection between our private dramas and our public shame.

After the Second World War, a lot of what had been happening in the U.S. before the war was swept under the rug and forgotten. Nazism and fascism were seen as things that happened in Germany and Italy, an evil that caused the rest of the world to unite in order to defeat it. But the fact is, these political movements had supporters in just about every country in Europe, and the United States. Antisemitism was pretty mainstream, and the rhetoric from such prominent men as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford was in line with what Hitler was saying. The color line was absolutely in force as well—black Americans were segregated off from white society in every important respect.

But for the most part, the movies ignored all that, presenting a world of adventure, comedy, dancing, music, and escapism to audiences during the Depression. Political topics were discouraged, both by the powerful forces in American society and the studios themselves, that didn’t want to disturb people, because that could potentially drive them away from movies, thus not spending the money in theaters that kept Hollywood going. Among the studios, however, Warner Brothers was something of an exception. Their stories were aimed more at working people in the cities, and they produced a lot of social problem pictures such as Dead End and I Was a Prisoner on a Chain Gang. One of the most unusual of such films, released in 1937 and directed by Archie Mayo, was called Black Legion.

Humphrey Bogart plays a factory worker named Frank Taylor, happily married with kids, who is expecting and looking forward to a promotion, when he can provide better support for his family. But to his shock and surprise, he gets passed over for this promotion by someone with a Polish sounding name, an immigrant who has worked hard and stayed up nights learning the business. While he simmers with resentment, a co-worker tells him about a secret vigilante group called The Black Legion, that commits violent acts against foreigners and immigrants who they say are stealing American jobs. If you join them, he is told, you must pledge total secrecy and loyalty to the Legion. Frank agrees to join, and when the Legion meets we see that they wear hoods and practice cult-like loyalty ceremonies. They get rid of Frank’s rival and thanks to them, he gets the promotion. But the Legion’s demands on his loyalty end up putting a strain on his relationship with his wife and best friend. If you’re expecting a simplistic happy outcome here, the film presents a bracing and uncomfortable reality instead.

Bogart hadn’t yet become the big star he would be in the ‘40s. He was mostly doing supporting roles, often as villains. Although he’s kind of a villain here too, he plays the main character, and the drama consists in his inner struggle between his decent impulses and the hatred against other groups that gradually takes over his mind and heart. It’s a very effective performance.

The story, by Robert Lord, was inspired by an actual anti-immigrant group in Michigan. But there are pointed similarities to the Ku Klux Klan as well. The Klan had become a powerful and widely accepted group in America, and it actually sued Warner Brothers because the movie used a Klan symbol in one of the scenes, but a judge threw out their case. There’s no mention of Jews or Blacks in the film—there were things you just couldn’t say in those days and be accepted in the mainstream of the entertainment industry. But the implications are clear, and watching this now is kind of scary because of the relevance to our current situation. We see Bogart’s character undergo a disturbing change from being a part of this cult-like organization, and this is the kind of thing we’re seeing in the United States today. It’s a significant detail that the Legion in the film targets foreigners and immigrants. Every fascist movement in history begins by attacking immigrants. It’s an easy way to scapegoat a powerless group in order to win the support and votes of people who are angry about their economic situation. In the film, we see that the people leading the Legion are wealthy, and spend a great deal of time planning how to make money from the group’s hate campaigns.

The screenplay gets a little preachy at the very end, but overall this is a very impressive piece of work that was way ahead of its time. I don’t remember seeing Black Legion shown on TV when I was a kid—maybe it was, but it must have been rare. It surprised me that a movie from the 1930s would be so brutally frank and relevant regarding the malicious political influences of that time, similar in so many ways to the forces threatening our democracy right now.

Already we feel a sense of constriction, an oppressive claustrophobia and holding in of emotions, before we even know exactly what we’re looking at in Swiss director Andreas Fontana’s debut film, Azor.

A man and woman arrive in Argentina, and gradually we learn that the man, Yvan De Wiel, played by Fabrizio Rangone, is a Swiss banker, and the woman is his wife Inès, played by Stéphanie Cléau. Yvan is there to replace one of his business partners at the bank named Réné, who had gained prominence among the bank’s super-wealthy clients in Buenos Aires, but who recently departed under mysterious circumstances. Réné was apparently both popular and trusted by these secretive clients, so Yvan is worried that they will miss their former banker too much to put their trust in him. And no one can say why or how Réné left, but there are hints of a possible transgression, something that might have alarmed the government.

Yvan is a very quiet, contained, diplomatic type. Privately he has doubts about his ability to handle this new assignment, but Inès is always there to strengthen his backbone, and to remind him of how careful he needs to be, while her presence on the trip is ostensibly to put their fabulously wealthy customers, and their wives, at ease, as if this were merely a social visit.

The director, Fontana, doesn’t give the audience much information on what’s going on. We have to stay on our toes and pay close attention, just like Yvan and Inès, and after some time we discover that the story is taking place in the early 1980s, when Argentina was ruled by a military junta that had recently taken power in a coup. The government is waging what eventually came to be known as the “dirty war,” a violent purging of leftists, liberals, intellectuals, and anyone else opposing the policies of the dictatorship.

Near the beginning of the film, the car taking the Swiss couple from the airport is delayed at a checkpoint, and they see two young men up against a wall, being searched by police. We almost expect to see them shot, but this film is all about drawing conclusions from what we don’t see or hear. The car goes on and we never find out what happened to the men, if anything.

Yvan’s clients are from the ruling class of Argentina. They live in luxurious villas and hold meetings in expensive hotels with swimming pools and waiters serving cocktails. Clearly, the Swiss bank that employs Yvan is financing the junta and all its activities, but everything is shrouded in vague phrases and euphemisms.

Yvan’s studied politeness is a marvel of stone-faced restraint. The title of the film, Azor, we discover, is a kind of code the couple adopted from the banking world of Geneva, meaning “to be careful and quiet.”

There’s an unnerving air of menace throughout the movie, which you might expect to explode into some kind of thrilling climax, but instead just keeps simmering, and this is a major element in the thinking of Fontana and his co-screenwriter, Mariano Llinás, about the reality of societies under dictatorship, as opposed to the more dramatic effects of fiction. Crucially, the film shows how ordinary people doing business can agree to participate in evil—by being silent and pretending they don’t see.

Yvan starts to piece together a possible reason for Réné’s disappearance when he visits the man’s deserted flat and sees a list of clients with one unfamiliar name at the end: Lazaro. Who or what is Lazaro? He will need to find out, but without disturbing the delicate power relations between him and his hosts.

The film’s style is remarkably tense, yet understated. We, the audience, must read between the lines, and notice especially the behavior of the women in this rarefied upper class world. They unintentionally reveal more of the truth in their casual conversations than the men. The political vision of this excellent film is stark and eerie in its portrayal of a society plunged in shadow, but which cunningly hides the darkness with every word and gesture. In Azor, we learn that silence is one of the most effective forms of oppression.

New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion was a big part of the cinematic breakthrough of her home country, and Australia, in the 1980s and ‘90s. She’s still best known for 1993’s The Piano, but her subsequent work has maintained her reputation for excellence. However, she hadn’t made a theatrical feature in 12 years until now, with her acclaimed new film called The Power of the Dog.

Adapted by Campion from a 1967 novel by the American writer Thomas Savage, The Power of the Dog takes place in Montana in 1925. Two brothers, Phil and George Burbank, have been given this land in southwest Montana by their elderly parents, but their mentor and idol was a wild character named Bronco Henry, to whose memory Phil is particularly devoted. Bronco Henry introduced them to the cowboy life. Phil, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is a hard-working ranch boss, whose toughness, charisma and authoritative manner commands respect from the hands working there. Jesse Plemons plays the younger brother, George, whose talents are more financial: managing the payroll, working with the banks, and so forth. From the beginning we see that Phil bullies his brother, calls him “fatso” and “dumb,” treatment to which George is evidently accustomed, and which he usually brushes off without taking the bait. Without a doubt, they’re used to each other. They even share the same bed.

Trouble begins, as we know it must, when George takes an interest in Rose Gordon, played by Kirsten Dunst. Rose is a widow struggling to keep the local inn and eatery running. Phil doesn’t like George having outside interests; he doesn’t like Rose; and he feels particular contempt for Rose’s 20-year-old son Peter, a thin effeminate intellectual type who is ruthlessly mocked by all the hands, and is played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.

I’ve seen Cumberbatch play a villain before, notably in one of the Star Trek movies, but this is different. Campion never glamorizes “bad guys” or invests them with mystery. Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Phil Burbank is brilliant because Phil’s meanness is so ordinary. A real bully is hiding fear, and we can feel it in this character even when he seems the most tough.

Campion also has the discipline to not try too hard. The deceptively simple story is presented without bombast or even much emphasis beyond Jonny Greenwood’s menacing score, which admittedly is quite dominating. Instead of tricking everything up with dramatic emphasis, Campion lets the story speak for itself, and we learn more about these characters than we may have expected. To reveal more would be a spoiler, but let’s just say that when the movie was over, I could finally notice the clues and tie them together, and thereby notice my own mistaken assumptions about what is going on.

The entire film was shot in New Zealand, but it looked like Montana to me. And there are dogs in the film, but the meaning of the title, The Power of the Dog, actually comes from Psalm 22 in the Bible. You’ll have to see for yourself what that means. Jane Campion’s intriguing western parable has a stinger at the end of its tail.

French director Jacques Rivette has been subverting narrative expectations for most of his career. It seems to be his mission in life to turn the art of storytelling inside out, allowing us to see how the construction of stories in our heads determines the ways we see the world. None of his films exemplifies this more than his impish 1974 masterpiece Celine and Julie Go Boating.

Celine, a free-spirited bohemian with a magic act, played by Julie Berto, and Julie, a daydreamer and librarian played by Dominique Lobourier, meet by chance in a Paris park, inaugurating a strange friendship that involves playing tricks on each other, assuming each other’s roles and generally improvising little schemes and adventures. There’s a playful, making-it-up-as-we-go-along feeling to all of this, and as it turns out, it’s all meant to seem improvised. The screenwriters, Rivette and Eduardo Gregorio, opened the story up for elaboration by the two leads, and a couple of the other actresses in the film as well. Celine and Julie are all about breaking free from rigid conventions of storytelling into a free-flowing style that is based on inter-feminine talk, fantasy, and play. The principals work very well together, as if they’ve been friends for years. And throughout there is a delightful mocking attitude towards male roles, male privilege, and conventional (in other words, male) ideas of what drama is all about.

Later the duo stumbles on a house haunted by the ghosts of a widower, two women who want him, and his young daughter. Celine and Julie go about reconstructing the mysterious melodrama of the house, “remembering” images and scenarios through sucking on magic candy they have received in their sojourns there. In the process, we see scenes jumbled up in different orders, repeated, or linked together like a puzzle. The bizarre, gothic murder story is set off by the irreverent commentary of the two goofballs.

Rivette pays tribute to the mystery and fantasy realms while making fun of them in a lighthearted way, using his two leads to tear the plot apart and reveal the sexual and familial roles that lie festering like madness underneath.

The picture is over three hours long—it’s intended to serve as an antidote to the tyranny of tightly-plotted little dramas, so to that end we have a film of wandering and tangents, puns both verbal and visual, and a Lewis Carroll-style subversion of waking reality. This is a film that establishes a world of its own, with its own charms, subtle feelings and disorientations. And it has a different sense of space as well—enough room to laugh and make comments, or just munch loudly on your popcorn.

German writer-director Christian Petzold has become, for me, one of those filmmakers that whatever movie he makes, I’m going to see it. He is consistently daring in his narrative and stylistic choices, exploring ideas about society, relationships, and the tortured history of modern Germany. He never settles for a simple message or a story giving you expected results, and so it requires openness and attention on the part of the viewer in order to fully experience the meanings of his films. His latest is called Undine, and unlike his last few pictures, it is set in the present.

Paula Beer, who seems to be the biggest young star in German movies right now, plays Undine, a young woman who is an historian of urban planning, and works at the Berlin Tourist center making presentations about the city’s architectural history. The idea of a city as a repository in which events of the past influence how we live and feel today is an important one for Petzold, who is especially attuned to the special atmosphere of Berlin. The film gets into this more closely as Undine does a lecture on the Humboldt Forum, a museum recently built within the structure of the 18th century Berlin Palace, the home of Prussian and German monarchs. Eventually we see that this symbolizes the story told in this film—new people and events echoing much older ones.

We see the beautiful Undine having coffee with her boyfriend. He’s breaking up with her because he’s in love with someone else. She tells him that he can’t do that because then she will have to kill him. This is a startling thing to say, but the boyfriend acts like he’s used to this kind of thing from her. Her passionate romantic obsession reminds me of heroines from the literature of previous centuries. She’s a professional, so you might think she’d be above all this, but no. This is a jealous woman who refuses to let go. She tells the boyfriend he must see her again at the café at a certain time.

Later, when she shows up at the café and goes inside, her eyes are drawn to a large ornate aquarium and the figure of a toy deep sea diver that is in there among all the fish. Then a young man who had attended her presentation that day comes in wanting to talk to her, but he awkwardly stumbles, with the disastrous effect of knocking the entire aquarium down and drenching them both. This poetic and surreal sequence is when Undine first meets Christoph, played by Franz Rogowski. Rather than being angry at him for the accident, her attraction is immediate. And so the old boyfriend is forgotten, and Christoph and Undine become an item. Here the film’s apparent sense of reality gets trumped by symbolism. It turns out that Christoph is a professional underwater diver. He eventually takes her to where he works, and things get even stranger.

Now, non-German viewers would be forgiven for not knowing that the name Undine is from a popular 19th century German fairy tale that has been adapted since in stories and plays. It concerns a water spirit or nymph who becomes human when she is loved by a man, but must return to the water if he is unfaithful. Literal minded reviewers are describing this film as if Undine is actually a supernatural being, and this is a common error people make when they see a modern story based on myth or folklore.

But Petzold only uses the mythical element as a stylistic vehicle for his own questions and issues about romantic love. What we learn about the relationship of Undine and Christophe is that she is quickly swept off her feet, as they say, and passionately committed. But Christophe, apparently unlike the men she’s known before, is more interested in getting to know her as a person, doing things together, and taking it slow rather than jumping into bed right away. He is in a sense breaking the mold, and his innocent exuberance and childlike expressions of love entrance her, but also confuse her.

Petzold is contrasting being “in love” with love, and in showing this contrast, he is evoking tragedy. Tragic love stories aren’t attempted very often anymore. I don’t mean melodrama, or even a sad romance, but a story that makes a connection between lost love and an intuition of eternity. Petzold has done that here, with a new variation on an old myth, and Paula Beer shines as the title character, a woman who seeks something real but is also, you realize, half-mad, and a mystery to herself and others. Undine depicts the most tragic distance one could experience between two souls trying to connect.

The true story of a large Romanian family living in a wilderness area facing the threat of being forced to move to the big city.

The picture opens with a group of boys playing in a lake, trying to catch fish by hand, chasing birds, having fun being boys. They are part of a large family living in what appears to be a remote wilderness area, a mother and father and their nine kids with dogs, playing and running about, but also hunting and foraging to survive. The camera then pans up—to our amazement we see that their bit of wilderness, this deserted marshland, is right next to a major city. It is Bucharest, the capital of Romania. The family are the Enaches and the film is called Acasă, which means “home.” The distributors are calling the film Acasă, My Home, which is repetitive, but does make things clearer for an English-speaking audience.

Their home is an abandoned reservoir on the outskirts of the city that fell into disuse after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989. The patriarch of the Enaches, Gica, bitter about civilization after he suffered unjust prison time, moved there almost twenty years ago with his wife Niculina, built a little shack, got some pigs and chickens, and just kept having kids. The oldest, Vali, is sixteen, and is tasked with doing a lot of the work around this little camp, and there’s tension between him and Gica, who is an absolute dictator and does a lot of sitting around.

Acasă is the debut documentary of director Radu Ciorniciuc. He and his crew won the complete trust of the family, co-existing with them for months, and letting the camera run while they go through the routine actions of each day. But what’s routine to them looks pretty remarkable to us—each kid, except the two youngest, have jobs and responsibilities, catching fish, lugging water, and so forth. There’s also a lot of time for just playing around, and in this environment, in the midst of nature, it’s easy to start thinking that this is an idyllic life. The kids themselves seem to think so, most of the time, loving to run and be outdoors, but of course they don’t know any other life. And it’s not so simple, as is true for any situation. They barely get by, the father earning spare cash by giving people informal tours of the area. The conditions aren’t that clean either, with nine kids all sleeping in one big bed, and in fact it all looks like really hard work.

In any case, this is the life the parents have chosen, and it has its advantages and drawbacks. As the film opens, we discover that the Bucharest authorities have been sniffing around, sending people in to inspect the place, including their version of child protective services. In a remarkable early sequence, the city people are spotted coming towards the marsh, and Vali is in charge of whisking all the kids away to a hideout further into the brush. They’re not spotted that time, but as the movie goes on, the pressure increases. Eventually the hammer falls. The government has decided to declare the area a nature preserve. The Enaches are going to be moved to the city, and the kids have to go to school.

The process that we witness the family having to go through in the second part of the film is very hard and painful. Working, paying the rent, adjusting to the starkly different quality and rhythm of city life, it all takes a toll. The parents don’t adjust well. The children do a little better, learning how to read and write pretty quickly, which is one of Vali’s complaints that he makes against his father, that he never bothered to teach his kids to read. They also face discrimination in the city, and from the barest of hints I realized that the Enaches’ ethnicity is Roma, or what people used to call Gypsies. But Ciorniciuc chooses not to be explicit on this point, perhaps worrying that the ethnic element may obscure the greater meanings of the film, such as the duality between modernity and ancient customs, the city and the country.

The story brings up a lot of emotions. Some of the kids wish they could go back to their relatively freewheeling existence in the marsh. Others, including Vali, are determined to become civilized, so to speak, something which we see can be both inspiring and damaging. Life in the wild was difficult and backward, but this supposed civilization is harsh and unforgiving. In Acasă we take a journey with this unusual family and are confronted with questions about how we adapt to society, and what is gained, but also very much what is lost along the way.

The deep chasm between rich and poor in India is the subject of a terrific new film from Ramin Bahrani called The White Tiger. Adapted from a best selling debut novel by Aravind Adiga, the story concerns Balram Halwai, a young man from a large poor family in a north Indian village. He sees the local landlord and his goons squeezing all the people in the village for their money, using physical force when necessary. And he decides to get out of his dead-end situation by attaching himself somehow to this landlord. His opportunity arrives when he hears that the boss is looking for a second driver, a chauffeur for his son and presumptive heir Ashok.

The title The White Tiger comes from an incident in Balram’s childhood, when a teacher declares him a prodigy, a white tiger, which is supposedly born only once in a century. Balram is prevented by his family from pursuing more education, but this sense of being special or even “chosen” becomes an underlying belief.

Balram’s idea is to be the perfect servant and instrument of crooked businessmen, and thereby rise up on the social ladder himself. He is of a lower caste, so he must really put on the charm to get in. And such is his natural talent and air of friendliness that he succeeds in becoming the second driver. But his expectation that excellent service will lead to success turns out to be not so simple. He gets pulled into the family drama, and particularly into the couples dynamic of Ashok and his Americanized wife Pinky, who is unhappy back in India and wants to live in the States. When things start to go wrong, Balram’s constant need to ingratiate himself opens him up to being scapegoated.

Ramin Bahrani is an Iranian-American director who likes to challenge assumptions about class and race in his films. Up until now his movies have been set in the U.S. Here, in adapting the Adiga novel, he shows a real talent for revealing the contradictions of modern India. Caste is a very complicated subject. It’s similar to the social classes we’re familiar with, but with roots in pre-industrial Indian society and religion rather than just in economics. Balram’s self-awareness around caste is like the atmosphere he breathes. The fear and separation that supports caste is always a factor in why he does things. He will always be an outsider to the caste of his employer.

Another big part of the mix here is the dominance of American culture and finance—the same forces driving inequality in the U.S. are at play here, and Bahrani is adept at capturing the weird, sometimes humorous, effect of the West on the Indians who are trying to make it in the world of high finance.

The main character in the film, Balram, is played by 26-year-old Adarsh Gourav, and what a performance it is. We can see the tension between the ambitious young man and the man who is always smiling and offering to help. He can be tentative, unintentionally revealing gaps in his knowledge and upbringing, but at the same time project exuberant confidence. As the story goes on, and things get more difficult, Gourav brilliantly conveys the changes in Balram’s attitude. There’s a side of him that’s reckless and will take the big chance if needs be, and then there’s a gradual hardening of his emotions and the growth of a ruthless and resentful side. He’s volatile, expressive, and witty. It’s a fine piece of acting. The rest of the cast supplies vivid support, with the standout being Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Pinky, the selfish wife who thinks she’s being progressive.

The plot elements in The White Tiger turn the picture into something of a suspense thriller. Balram is confronted with choices as momentous as life and death. But The White Tiger, remarkably, is also a satire of social conditions in today’s India, and a critique of the make-believe world created by wealthy people on the backs of the rest of us.  

Emma Seligman’s debut feature uses a shiva, a Jewish post-funeral gathering, as the setting for a comedy about a young woman who doesn’t fit in, but tries to act like she does.

Shiva Baby, a comedy of discomfort from Canadian writer/director Emma Seligman, opens with college senior Danielle, played by Rachel Sennott, having sex with a slightly older man named Max. When they’re done, she hints at a prior arrangement, and Max dutifully hands her some cash, saying that he likes the idea of helping someone so smart go to law school. Later, we see Danielle, now dressed up nicely, meeting her parents outside a house where a family is sitting shiva, a Jewish custom of mourning a dead person after a funeral, practiced in this case rather informally.

Danielle doesn’t know who died. She’s only there because her incredibly pushy and controlling mother, played by Polly Draper, asked her to come. The guests are an assortment of affluent Jewish friends and neighbors, who mingle and eat and chat and gossip while maintaining a certain level of post-funeral decorum. But at this particular shiva, Danielle gets a couple of surprises. There among the guests is Maya, a young woman with whom she’s having a fling. This fact is fairly well known among a number of the guests, which they regard with disapproval. Then, Danielle notices another guest, Max, the sugar daddy we met in the first scene. It turns out he’s married, with a Gentile wife and a new baby, all of which is news to her.

The humor here is familiar in some ways: the older Jewish women asking “Are you seeing someone, sweetie?”; the smothering mom, the clueless dad. But the treatment is sharper than usual. There is a mounting sense of panic as Danielle’s private life threatens to become embarrassingly public. While her parents coach her in how to make it sound like she’s having a normal successful life, it becomes evident that she is lost, aimless, and wracked with shame. The dialogue is very amusing, but the main reason Shiva Baby works so well is the excellent Rachel Sennott. She nails this secretive, inarticulate, utterly confused yet defiant young woman as an absolute presence in the center of the film.

Seligman originally created Shiva Baby as a 15-minute thesis film at NYU in 2018, also starring Sennott. That was met with such approval that she fleshed the story out with more characters, to produce this, her first feature film. It retains an economy of style with a brilliantly compressed running time of 77 minutes. I love the idea of an entire film drama, after the opening scene, taking place at a shiva. These are supposed to be solemn events, or at least quietly respectful. The wild goings-on in this story are especially funny when contrasted with the setting.

There’s something inside Danielle that wants to violate decorum, to scream out that she doesn’t really belong here, that she’s tired of pretending. And as it happens, this doubles as an impulse toward self-sabotage. Sending a picture of her boobs to Max during the party, and then accidentally leaving her phone in the bathroom, the possibility of discovery by the shiksa wife, who seems to suspect that there’s something going on, hangs over the rest of the picture. Meanwhile, Maya, her secret lesbian partner, also notices that she’s acting weird, and thus keeps provoking her. The film becomes like a neurotic pressure cooker, but not without an occasional poignant moment, such as Danielle trying to reach out for help to her mother, but not being able to decide what kind of help she needs.

Max’s little baby cries throughout the day, prompting judgmental guests to wonder out loud why anyone would bring a baby to a shiva. The title, Shiva Baby, plays on that bit of quirky symbolism, while also referring to our main character and her childlike fear of failure.

This is a good, honest comedy. In fact, Shiva Baby is so funny, it hurts.