Alex Garland has always been thematically clear in his films. His first two directorial efforts, “Ex Machina” (2015) and “Annihilation” (2018), plumbed creationism and doom, while “Men” (2022) donned the veneer of horror as it wrestled with toxic masculinity and misogyny. Here Garland shifts to the more immediate and less fantastical with this loose-lensed scrutiny of journalism, namely its relevance and the ethics of those plying it. Sure, the civil war of the title is happening across the United States, but it’s vague as to why; all we know is that the Western Forces – a two-star alliance with their own, more spartan rendering of the ol’ red, white and blue – consists of seceded states Texas and California, and that Florida is a wild card trying to pull the Carolinas in to some kind of something or other. It’s a MacGuffin wrapped inside an enigma for certain, but Red and Blue states aligning is a bit of a stretch. Given the premise, folks are going to want to reflect on the nastiness here and now and how we move on, but “Civil War” is not that film. It takes a while to work that out and get on the page with Garland, a more-than-capable writer (“28 Days Later,” “Never Let Me Go”) and inherently immersive filmmaker.
“Civil War” opens with journalists in New York City recording mob unrest and the efforts of a bristling police presence trying to tamp it down. Again, the who and why isn’t explained, but given the immediacy of the scene, Garland and his crew transport us beyond our want-to-knows as veteran war photographer Lee Miller (Kirstin Dunst) snaps away at the post-explosion carnage of a car bomb. Trying to tag along is Jessie (Carlee Spaeny, the apple of Elvis’ eye in “Priscilla”) a Lee Miller wannabe who shoots on old-school film and would have been digitized herself if it weren’t for Lee pushing her out of the bomb blast. Like the punchy western journos in “Welcome to Sarajevo” (1997) and “The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982), the correspondents regroup in a hotel, drink scotch, milk each other for scoops and discuss the next hot spot locale to pursue a story. Lee and her pen man Joel (Wagner Moura) want to score an interview with the power-clinging, third-term president (Nick Offerman) before D.C. is beset. Jessie weasels her way in, as does Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), an older political reporter from the Times looking to get to the front line in Charlottesville. The winding 800 miles to D.C. (can’t go down the main coastal roads) is filled with strange moments: a vintage boutique in a Southern hamlet seemingly untouched by the conflict, a gas stop where alleged looters hang from rafters awaiting “trial,” meticulous mass graves and plenty of skirmishes where not many seem to know what they are fighting for or who’s on whose side. “I’m just shooting at a guy who’s shooting at me,” one gentleman in camouflage and punk-dyed hair offers as he tries to suss out a sniper.
At the end of the not-too-golden bricked road, Garland stages a phenomenally choreographed siege of Washington that’s as heartbreaking as it is breathtaking. Through it all he digs into the “objective indifference” of journalists – the professional tenet of getting the story and being impartial. It’s a cold and effective mirror that raises begging questions, and others more practical and immediate: If powers are to fall, will the organizations they file with still exist (the Times and Reuters) and if so, shouldn’t they become freelancers for foreign press such as the BBC or The Guardian? Then there’s the matters of personal preservation and the reasons for the civil war that are never discussed, which makes you see more notorious touch points in our recent past, namely Jan. 6 and the Proud Boys. To be clear, the Western Forces are no liberating army – or at least not one I’d want to be liberated by, as they shoot first and ask few questions. When they do ask, if your answers aren’t right, you’re dead. Twice as dead if you’re not white.
It’s a slippery yet provocative slope. Some might call it manipulative stoking of fears without owning it, and they’d be right. The film also falters with Jessie; she’s as shallow as dew mist – an amalgam of parts with nothing human to grab on to, and Spaeny feels miscast. Thankfully that all fades in the rearview as things ramp up en route to D.C. As a visionary behind a pen or a lens, Garland has a penchant for lawless dystopia that translates well here, and frighteningly so. The war in the backyard holds our eyes and our minds even if the themes offered fail to fully crystallize in the billowing smoke of the distant hills.
“Love Lies Bleeding,” the delightfully audacious lesbian crime noir from Rose Glass, may not be a road movie per se, but it sure feels like one. It’s everything “Drive-Away Dolls” wanted to be and more: edgy, free of tropes and seared tight by the kind of angry authenticity that imbued “Titane” (2019), “Bound” (1994) or anything Greg Araki ever lambasted us with in the 1990s.
The setting’s a podunk New Mexico town in the mid-1980s – boxy cars, big hair and no cellphones – where Lou (Kristen Stewart) bides her time toiling at a no-frills pump-and-grunt gym, where unclogging the toilet is job No. 1. (And this loo is not like the sleek pieces of pristine public art tended to in Wim Wenders’ well received “Perfect Days.”) No, this is like a Fenway’s men’s room at its odorous worst, and the clientele are all juiced-up meatheads, though Lou feels at home among them, like one of those small fish that swims calmly among sharks and cleans their gills. It probably helps that she has a side hustle shilling steroids.
Lou lives a modest existence. Her flat is classic Allston: worn sofa, tatty rug and clothes strewn everywhere. Her life feels flat too. There is no light in it. Even her one passing love interest, Daisy, (Anna Baryshnikov, daughter of Mikhail), a vapid young woman with a beaming smile and nothing to say even though she’s always talking, feels done and over with. Clearly something has to give, and we get the first whiff of what’s going on under the covers when two FBI agents posing as old family friends come by to inquire about Lou’s father and mother. It’s here we learn Lou is somewhat estranged from her father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris, rocking a Brian Eno ’70s do), who owns the gym, a gun range and most everything (and everyone) else in the town, but remains close to her sister Beth (an unrecognizable Jena Malone in a blonde bob) who has a tumultuous home life with her husband J.J. (Dave Franco), a rat-tailed scum who works at the firing range.
Tangled webs and criminal pasts get more tangled when Jackie (a super-jacked Katy O’Brien) drifts into town and Lou’s gym, but not before an encounter with J.J. Jackie’s a transient soul pumping her way across America en route to a bodybuilding contest in Las Vegas. She’s got big dreams and even bigger pecs. It’s love at first pump, or something like that. After getting cornered by two sneering lunkheads, Jackie and Lou fall into bed. Souls get bared, love springs and Jackie moves in (she had been sleeping under a bridge). For much-needed cash, she takes up a job waitressing at Lou Sr.’s shooting range, which doesn’t sit too well with Lou.
Glass, who made audiences take notice with “Saint Maude” (2019), an immersive, eerily tense ambient piece, strikes a dutiful balance between pulp punchiness and grrl power anthem with a peppering of gonzo genre-stretching flourishes. One of those goes-to-11 touches is Jackie juicing to the point of Hulk-like ’roid rages and some outré, almost Lynchian veers into alter reality. The chemistry between Lou and Jackie carries the film atop its broad, sculpted shoulders, driven by the kind of passion and injustice that made “Thelma & Louise” (1991) and “Bound” (1996) such indelible fist-in-the-air fuck-the-patriarchy staples. The cinematography by Ben Fordesman recasts the neon-basked Southwest in a gritty neo-noir light that deepens the film’s sense of time, place and genre, but the key here is Stewart, whose underreactive restraint is the film’s hook. Jackie’s the hammer. The two together are an intoxicating tandem, vulnerable yet steeled as they try to make it to tomorrow and their way out.
After seeing the first installment of Denis Villeneuve’s reenvisioning of Frank Herbert’s beloved sci-fi saga, the prospect of “Dune: Part Two” left me with a modicum of dread. Why? Villeneuve (“Arrival,” “Blade Runner 2049”), who is a competent craftsman and then some, had done well with a rote, by-the-numbers introduction that, while serviceable, didn’t seem to have the gravitas – or the legs – to go above and beyond David Lynch’s much-made-of 1984 version. Plus, who was going to take on the role of the ruthless Feyd-Rautha that Sting made so memorable in the Lynch version, and would Timothée Chalamet’s taciturn and aloof Paul Atreides ever give us a reason to yield up a precious thimble of perspiration? Questions to which we now get answers.
“Part Two” is bigger, a notch better and longer too, mostly because much of the requisite backstory has been dispensed: A feudal empire occupying the desert planet of Arrakis, the only source of melange or spice, a drug that lengthens one’s life and can imbue super-prescient capabilities and space travel via hyper warp. (Call it oil or coca for cocaine and you’d have the precious resource analogy.) The displacement and oppression of the Indigenous folk of the planet – yes, Herbert bridged feudalism and colonialism, for a double fucking of people simply going about their daily lives.
There’s more action in “Part Two” – and more worms – as Chalamet’s Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), transition into the messiah realized and Reverend Mother of the Fremen, the Indigenous people, by drinking the blood of one of those giant sandworms. It’s a crazy acid trip that kills most who decide to drop out and tune in; only those destined by prophecy make it through, or something like that. Paul even gets to ride a worm (far less cheesy than Kyle MacLachlan’s sand surfing back in 1984, but somehow not quite as satisfying). And of course there’s the whole big take-back-the-planet throw-down with the Harkonnens, bad guys led by a grotesque baron (the always excellent Stellan Skarsgård, nearly unrecognizable under makeup and CGI) who violently displaced House Atreides as stewards of Arrakis in “Part One.”
The mega battles are mostly blessedly brief – clearly Villeneuve knew that throngs of shadowy figures wielding knives in a sandstorm wasn’t a sustainable spectacle. The visuals that make it onto the screen are lean, pointed and stunning, some through fine editing and special effects (including beguiling shots of moons and distant planets) as well as scrumptious cinematography by Greig Fraser (“The Mandalorian,” “Zero Dark Thirty”), not only of vast sandscapes but in the gladiatorial arena on the home planet of House Harkonnen, shot in a post-nuclear-blast ashy black-and-white. That’s where the baron’s nephew, Feyd-Rautha, slices up a few Atreides holdovers as part of his birthday celebration. (Feyd-Rautha is played by “Elvis” portrayer Austin Butler, bringing his own bite to the part and looking like one of the pasty, skin-headed war boys out of 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.”)
As far as the casting goes, Chalamet and Ferguson grow in their parts. There was something off about Chalamet in “Part One,” and that lingers some here too; the sum of the parts doesn’t quite add up. Winners are Zendaya getting more screen time as Chani, Paul’s Fremen warrior instructor and love interest; Javier Bardem’s cagey Stilgar, one of the Fremen elders who feels like he could walk into any David Lean-directed desert epic and be at home; Butler; and, in smaller parts as members of the priestess-witch sisterhood known as the Bene Gesserit – Lady Jessica belongs to it – Florence Pugh as the emperor’s daughter, coming into her powers; Charolette Rampling as the Mother Reverend, in consultation with the emperor; and Léa Seydoux, lithe and fawning as Lady Margot, who’s assigned by Rampling’s Mother to ferret out Feyd-Rautha by any charming means possible. The one negative is the casting of Christoper Walken as the emperor. Don’t get me wrong, I love Walken and nearly everything he’s done, but the soft-spoken Jersey boy heavy in outer space doesn’t quite make the warp jump.
With its coveted resource as the plot-triggering core, and a crash-and-burn extraction process, “Dune: Part Two” isn’t far off from an “Avatar” chapter. It has a different ecosystem – desert instead of jungle and water – but the same invasive avarice. It packs in a lot thematically beyond space colonialism, though. Religion comes under scrutiny: Is it a means of pacifying and controlling the masses, as Chani challenges, or can sustained faith lead believers to a better place? As prophecy meets politics, the players in Herbert’s universe reveal themselves to be playing games within games as the ones holding the strings of power vie for legacy and control.
Speaking of the future, just like with “Part One,” the next “Dune” chapter isn’t announced at the film’s conclusion. Rest assured there will be a “Part Three.”
Considering the fantastic cast and punchy setup, this is a bit of a toe stub for Ethan Coen in his second outing (his other being the 2022 rock-doc “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind”) since splitting in 2019 with his brother Joel from a partnership that generated some of the most revered films of the recent cinematic past – “Fargo” (1996) and “No Country for Old Men” (2007) among them. These drive-away dolls are lesbians on a road trip to hell (well, Florida) to deliver a car and visit one’s nana. The car contains wanted cargo (a MacGuffin with shades of “Repo Man” that doesn’t have the greatest of payoffs) with a bunch of shady goons in hot pursuit. The lines between the sexually liberated Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and demure bestie Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) are drawn starkly in nearly every scene; along the way Jamie brings hookups back to their various motel rooms as the bookish Marian heads to the lobby to read Henry James during playtime. It’s a buddy movie with romantic possibilities – a soccer club spin-the-bottle makeout session forces the issue. Coen and his co-writer, wife Tricia Cooke, who edited projects such as “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) and “The Big Lebowski” (1998), borrow too much from their shared canon, namely C.J. Wilson and Joey Slotnick as idiosyncratic goons (and that is literally how the are referred to in the credits) whose opposite approaches to dealing with an escalating situation feel ripped slackly from “Fargo.” Qualley, so good in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019) and last year’s “Sanctuary,” furthers her blossoming CV with an energetic, scene-pushing presence bolstered by an affable southern twang, and Viswanathan makes for a good offset. The chemistry between the two carries the uneven mishmash as it stumbles early and struggles to regain its quirky vibe. Also in the mix, in small raucous parts, are Matt Damon as a Florida Man, Colman Domingo as the goon handler, Pedro Pascal on ice, Beanie Feldstein (“Booksmart”) as Jamie’s brash law enforcement ex and Bill Camp as the car dispatcher no one listens to. At least this not-quite-fully-baked road comedy with a prize dildo set gone missing is a fast 84 minutes.
If you didn’t think we needed another Holocaust film, Jonathan Glazer would like you to think again. “The Zone of Interest” is Glazer’s very loose adaptation of the novel by Martin Amis, the author of “London Fields” who passed away last year before the film was shown at Cannes, and it flips the lens on one of the most heinous and barbaric undertakings committed to history. The major departure from Amis’ text is that Glazer opts to go less obliquely at the matter: Instead of using Amis’ fictionalized commandant of Auschwitz, he names names, focusing on the real-life Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), whom we grimly learn was something of a revered efficiency expert; his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller); and their five young children. Technically you could call “The Zone of Interest” a biopic, but one like you’ve never seen before.
The other big changeup is that we never step inside the walls of the death camp and, for the most, hang out with Hedwig and the children as she tends to the garden and they play in their well-manicured yard in the shadow of a high wall lined with barbed wire. Occasionally we hear a muffled scream or distant gunshot, the repugnant gravity of which is an alarming stab in the ribs. But for Frau Höss, this is the everyday, and she goes about her business without a second thought. There are times too that particles of ash fall from above, giving reason for a cough or the application of a tissue. Other than those inconveniences, life for the Höss contingent is not far off from that of the von Trapp family, sans the musical numbers and wide smiles. And that’s Glazer’s quiet driving point, that such an atrocity was born of complacency and complicity, be it by birth, assimilation, association or failure to see – willful or not – and could happen again. Did the children have choice in their station, did even mom and dad? There’s much to chew on. More diabolical scenes have Rudolf in meetings with peers and higher-ups looking to score maximum efficiency as crammed carloads of poor souls from Hungary are ushered north by train and into the jaws of Höss’ well-honed, methodical processes. Compared with “Succession,” it’s a staid, dour affair, as all are on the same page. There is no contention or hidden agendas, just quiet agreement with the cold winds of detached dehumanization whirring loudly.
To give us an abstract tear-away – a palate cleanser – Glazer every now and then drops into nocturnal scenes, shot in black-and-white thermal imaging, of a young girl wandering through a strange, foreboding landscape doing something or other with apples. It feels like a page from Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006) and, likewise, is a means of dealing with trauma and the bigger conflict taking place in the outside world.
This is the first film in 10 years by Glazer, director of the edgy, sublime British gangster flick “Sexy Beast” (2000). His last was “Under the Skin,” an eerie, inventive sci-fi pontification on an alien foraging for food, with us being the food.
The “Zone” score by Mica Levi, whose dark, ethereal notes Glazer relied upon to make “Under the Skin” so transportive, amplifies the anguish in achy grinds that not only echo the pain and suffering from inside the walls, but the torment within those meting the wrongs as they struggle with the consequences of their actions. There’s one brief yet powerful scene of remorse in which one agent of repugnance doubles over and gags, ostensibly to cough up the evil entity inside that possesses him. There is no exorcism or atonement for those choosing genocide.
The central performances are essential. Not enough can be said for Hüller and her work in the past year. She was the primary reason Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” registered as so extraordinary in its otherwise ordinary scope, and is just as valuable here projecting a controlled, stoic posture bolstered by a dark sense of privileged entitlement. Friedel too is all in, but Glazer’s camera doesn’t often leave the domestic realm of the Höss house, and daddy’s a very busy man, who like any good family guy doesn’t bring his work home with him – even if it looms over his backyard with all the girth and heft of a menacing kaiju restrained by chains that are bound to break. The reckoning is there, and Glazer roots us so we can’t look away, imbedded with corroded souls swept up in a malignant campaign.
2023 was a quietly powerful year at the movies. It marked the return of the sharply observant auteur, Jonathan Glazer after nearly a decade away since his beguiling sci-fi effort “Under the Skin.” Sure, we had the bofo ado over “Barbenheimer,” but anything for a headline and marketing promotion, right? I deeply appreciated “Barbie” and its pink ambition, but it didn’t crack my top 20. Of my top 10, five are International (Non-English) and three are documentaries—it was a very strong year for docs. Also, if you’ve never heard of the German actress Sandra Hüller, learn about her quick as she dominates the top of this year’s list, and whose name is destined to be called during award nods.
1. Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, dissects the slow, vicious implosion of a marriage. The reasons why are the usual suspects: grief, blame and jealousy. But there’s little else usual about Triet’s emotionally eviscerating narrative, which begins with the death of one spouse and, in carefully curated frames, rewinds as the survivor is put on trial for murder. The performance by Sandra Hüller as a revered German writer living in the remote highs of the French Alps and then subjected to character dissection in the courtroom, is immersive, fully felt and the reason the film rivets from opening to closing frame. Between her work here and “Zone of Interest” Hüller could see her name called twice when Oscar nominations are announced.
2. Zone of Interest
It’s been ten years since Jonathan Glazer last enchanted us with Scarlett Johansson as an otherworldly temptress in “Under the Skin,” driven by Mica Levi’s intoxicating and mood setting score. Interestingly “Zone” is a Holocaust film, which most would likely think, we’ve already done it to the point that there’s no new way to spin it to open one’s eyes anew. The answer is wrong. In this brave and unflinching adaptation of the Martin Amis novel (the writer passed earlier his year before the movie’s premier) Glazer replaces Amis’s fictionalized overseers of Auschwitz, dialing in tight on real-life camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his family (Sandra Hüller as his wife Hedwig) and their daily lives. You never really glimmer the inner workings of the diabolical Nazi machinery, instead you sit with the Höss’s as they dine and school their children in a well-manicured bungalow in the shadow of a high wall. Every now and then you hear a muffled wail, or the distant shots of gunfire—background noise that unnerves us the viewer as we drink in the complacency of a society willfully enlisted to undertake one of the most sinister acts of hate ever entered into the history books. Friedel and Hüller are flawless, and Levi again serves up a score that adds layers to deep moments unfurling onscreen.
3. You Hurt My Feelings
Indie writer-director Nicole Holofcener, the force behind such insightful dramadies as “Friends with Money” (2006) and “Lovely & Amazing” (2001), reunites with Julia Louis-Dreyfus (the pair worked on “Enough Said” back in 2013) for this barbed gem about the tender balance between brutal honesty and obligatory, loving support when Louis-Dreyfus’s Beth, a struggling novelist, overhears her husband Don (Tobias Menzies), tell his brother-in-law Mark (Arian Moayed, “Succession”) that he does not like Beth’s latest that’s still looking to catch on with her publisher. To her face, however Don tells her he likes it and thus a simple, but nagging conundrum ensues:does Beth confront Don or not? The sharp script moves in unexpected ways as Beth’s self-esteem is chipped away at by her publishers and her students in the classroom she commands. The bits with Don, a therapist with some of his own mounting professional woes, challenged by some of his clients including real-life wife and husband Amber Tamblyn and David Cross playing a miserable married couple, makes for dark, bristling hilarity. And as much as you laugh, the nuggets of revelation onscreen serve as a mirror to look uncomfortably inward.
4. The Holdovers
The latest from Alexander Payne (“Sideways,” “Citizen Ruth”), set at an all-boy, New England prep school in the early 1970s, bears the distinct tang of J.D. Salinger, not to mention Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” (1998) as it homes in on the loneliness of the disenfranchised among the entitled elite. The setup’s fairly straightforward: Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a gruff, unapologetic Western Civ. professor, is the faculty member who’s drawn the short-straw assignment of looking after the “holdovers” for Christmas break at a fictional New England preparatory called Barton. Joining Hunham and the five boys is school cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, divine and scene-stealing) a Black woman who spends much of her time – even when cooking – drinking and smoking to hold down the grief of having just lost her only child, a Barton grad (the only non-caucasian we know to attend the school besides one Korean boy) killed in the Vietnam War. The film comes down to the human connection between the cantankerous Hunham and last lingering holdover, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, deep and winning in his big screen debut) as past skeletons come to the fore and human connections are the only means of redemption.
5. Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan’s grand bio-pic plays loyally to its roots, the 2005 biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, as both embrace Oppenheimer (“the father of the atomic bomb”) as a committed yet complicated man, caught at many crossroads: the morality of mass destruction, the dirty politics of Cold War paranoia as well as many messy personal relationships. As Oppenheimer, frequent Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy portrays the scientist as a reserved, buttoned-up sort with a kind, demurring affect. He’s charismatic and approachable, with piercing blues and a gaunt sheen clearly deepened for the part, and Oppie’s signature wide-brim porkpie fedora goes a long way to cement the image. It’s a bravura performance that rightly sends Murphy, best known for the series “Peaky Blinders” and Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” (2002), to the fore after many years of almost getting there. He feels custom minted for the part. How Nolan pulls it all together is interesting in how much you see – or don’t – of the actual use of the atomic bomb and the devastation it had on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (though it’s in the corner of every frame) versus the high of the Trinity experiment at Los Alamos (well-orchestrated cinematically) and chaotic proceedings in the rooms and halls of government. Ever meticulous, Nolan also does a masterful job of gathering subthreads and small gestures and weaving them into surprising and disparate places with subtle poetic panache that doesn’t scream, “Did you just see what I did there?”
6. Killers of the Flower Moon
Working from journalist David Grann’s 2017 real-life account with the additional tag “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” there’s much in Martin Scorsese’s film that leverages the director’s mean-streets, gangland roots and much that unfurls, that if not stated as nonfiction, would otherwise be hard to believe. Set on an Osage reservation post-World War I, “Killers of the Flower Moon” has the grand, neo-western feel of Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate” (1980) and even Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) as Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, returning from the war (a cook, not a soldier, because he has a weak stomach) steps off a train in Fairfax, Oklahoma, and through nefarious opportunistic schemes orchestrated by Burkhart’s business man uncle William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro), making the bulk of his wealth off the Osage who have conditional oil rights, marries an Osage woman (Lily Gladstone who hold court with Oscar winners DiCaprio and De Niro) to bilk her of assets. The insidious ripples of colonialism and false sense of human respect and equality are put on full display; a must see for those who cling to the tenets and practices of American expansionism.
7. Geographies of Solitude
Jacquelyn Mills’s arresting documentary in one long, riveting contemplation on nature, loneliness, and commitment. The film depicts Sable Island a harsh stretch of land 100 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia as it follows the island’s only resident, Zoe Lucas who’s been there since the early 1970s studying the niche ecosystem where only horses, seals and insects thrive. The use of archival footage (Jacques Cousteau makes a visit via helicopter) and Lucas still going about her business in the now (cataloging the horses and tracking plastic pollution around the globe) is woven together as a medication that invites you onto the island in an observant, intimate way.
8. 20 Days in Mariupol
When Russia invaded the Ukraine in February of 2021 Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov was imbedded at a hospital in the port city of Mariupol. What Chernov endures and witnesses is the early part of the siege where residents trying to go about their daily lives are caught up in something they can’t quite comprehend. As Chernov weaves his way around the city with his crew it becomes evident too that he must leave, but most venues have been shut down. It’s a harrowing boots on the ground view into the wanton incursion that still pervades today.
9. Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros
Loosely translated “The Menu” and nothing to do with last year’s elite dinner party turned torture fest. At the young age of 90, local documentarian Fred Wiseman (“Titicut Follies”) shows no signs of slowing down with this lens turn on Troisgros family, who run the Michelin 3-star restaurant La Maison Troisgros in Central France. At four hours, the running time may give you pause, but Wiseman, a master of fly-on-the-wall observation, captures all the right moments, head chefs planning meals, the quality control selection of ingredients and the ballet of orchestration in the kitchen when it’s showtime. Reality TV cooking show this is not, it’s authentically more real, there’s no stitched together narrative for pomp and hype, just careful attention, arduous repetition, the hard work and the dish assembly collaborations that bring a world class meal to mouths expectant diners’ palates.
10. Taste of Things
Keeping with all things culinary is this visually scrumptious feast from Tran Anh Hung (“Scent of Green Papaya,” “Cyclo”), a keen observer of human longing, subtle sensualities and social restraints, which tells the tale of a cook Eugenie (the ever sublime Juliette Binoche) 20 years in the service of tacit gourmand Dodin (Benoît Magimel, on the mark here and also strong in “Pacification” that also came out this year). Based on the popular French novel “The Passionate Epicure” by Marcel Rouff, the culinary doings take place at a French chateau in the late 19th century as Eugenie and her small staff, with close oversight from Dodin prepare lavish and complex meals for Dodin’s coterie of friends. The long takes of food preparation are so stunning and in-the-moment, you can almost taste what you are seeing. It’s also impressive that the two-decade relationship between Eugenie and Dodin is conveyed in full through furtive glances and short exchanges as one peers through billows of steam rising from a pot or they carefully tresses a bird. Food hasn’t been this sensual or used as a narrative vehicle so completely since the “Babette’s Feast” (1987).
Close and in the hunt: Yorgos Lanthimos’s feminine, sexual spin on Frankenstein, “Poor Things,” Celine Song’s haunting tale of longing in “Past Lives,” the killer tandem of Juliane Moore and Natalie Portman in Todd Haynes’s “May December,” the creepy vacation excursion “Infinity Pool” from Brandon Cronenberg, son of horror auteur, David, the witty and endearing animation feature about a dog and his ‘bot, “Robot Dreams,” single mother, life balance nightmares in “Full Time,” Zac Ephron transforming himself into a WWE bruiser in Sean Durkin’s wrestling bio-pic, “Iron Claw,” “The Pigeon Tunnel,” Errol Morri’s intimate look into the surprising back story of David Cornwell: aka famed spy novelist John le Carré, the always excellent Mads Mikkelsen battling for land rights in “The Promised Land,” and Wim Wenders (“Wings of Desire”) helming “Perfect Day” the current Japanese entry for Best International Feature.
Cord Jefferson works warmth and humor into this satire of race and identity based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure.” The film centers on African American writer Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) who, much like Nicolas Cage’s academic in “Dream Scenario,” can no longer conjure up a note of relevance. No one wants to publish his latest, and instead implore him for something more “authentic.” The more concrete reality facing Monk is that his father has just died and his mother (played by the great Leslie Uggams) is struggling with memory challenges and needs full-time care, so after the ashes are spread seaside and mom has been situated, Monk holes up in the family harborside cottage just south of Boston (it’s not named, but Scituate) and out of an act of anger, pens a jokey “street lit” novel called “My Pafology.” The book becomes an instant hit – mostly with white audiences, which is a deft skewering throughout. As Monk’s agent (John Ortiz, working the part with the perfect balance of smarm and charm) puts it, “White people think they want the truth, but they just want to feel absolved.”
To seal the deal – and get the big bucks – Monk reluctantly takes on the nom de plume of Stagg R. Leigh, a made-up name for a dreamed-up street persona, who, as an on-the-fly bio has it, did time, is evading authorities and needs to maintain faceless anonymity because of alleged other transgressions against society. Many assume murder and more. With pained disdain Monk rolls his eyes whenever having to do such performative street-talk (think a watered down Mr. T), and bristles when another Black author (Issa Rae), who pulled a similar stunt with her smash success “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” endorses the book not knowing Monk is the author. The lawyer across the street (Erika Alexander, warm and resolute) with whom Monk has begun a simmering romance, not knowing he’s the pen behind the prose, defends the book when he challenges her on the notion that such books do nothing but pigeonhole and restrain Black people and the Black experience.
Ultimately Hollywood comes a knocking, the fourth wall gets shifted and the delicate, darkly funny tenor of the farce gets turned up a few too many notches for its own good. “American Fiction” marks Jefferson’s directorial debut after producing and writing for the hit series “Master of None” and the acrid HBO fantasy tasking the mainstream on race, “Watchmen.” His true asset here is the ever dutiful Wright (“Shaft,” “The French Dispatch”) who effortlessly shifts emotive states while maintaining an overriding pallor of weariness. He carries the film as much as his character carries his family and the bigger struggle to break racial barriers. The rest of the ensemble is equally on point, including Ortiz, Uggums and Sterling K. Brown, fiery and scene-stealing as Monk’s less dutiful, self-centered brother who’s just come out, not only adding to Monk’s burdens by not helping with the logistics of family transitions but by saddling him with the realities of “how it is” and dishing unnerving reveals about dad. “American Fiction” is a humorous and powerful pontification on race, reckoning and perceived reality – a hook with a barb that could have been plunged a little deeper.
“Poor Things” is a nifty mashup of genres from Yorgos Lanthimos, curator of things off-kilter and unsettling – as evidenced by such engrossing, psychologically dark works as “The Lobster” (2015), “Dogtooth” (2009) and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017). The film, based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel that borrows heavily from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” isn’t so much about reanimation as it is about reawakening. In this case, the subject is Bella (Emma Stone, who was Oscar-nominated for her last collaboration with Lanthimos playing a lady-in-waiting in a love triangle with Queen Anne in “The Favourite”). Her mind has not caught up to her body, as we hear her creator, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), remark to his affable Igor, a soulfully dark-eyed apprentice named Max (Ramy Youssef).
The time, as you can imagine, is Victorian London, which is rendered with more of a fantastical Disney theme-park vibe than Merchant-Ivory authenticity. Bella, as we first meet her, has a childlike brutishness. She delights at the giant bubbles emitted at the dinner table by Godwin – who in primal grunts she refers to as “God” (nothing heavy-handed there, though it is true that Shelley’s father was the philosopher William Godwin) – as the result of some deviant, Cronenbergian dialysis machine. Later, she punches Max in the nose with a gleeful smile and rapid “look at what I did” handclaps. In a quick flash through the receiving room door, a duck-headed dog scoots by; there are other cross-phylum curios roaming the homestead too, a harmless, friendly homemade menagerie. The special effects are well done. Godwin himself is hard to take your eyes off of, or perhaps too hard to linger on, as his face is panels of stitched flesh that look almost like you could peel them off and rearrange them should the desire rise.
For a while it’s a cozy, happy existence. The scientists poke at cadavers while Bella, mimicking them, hones her skills for a future at the local abattoir. As her mind becomes more adult, Godwin betroths her to Max, and the need for legal documentation brings a lecherous attorney into the mix. Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn might not be Snidely Whiplash, but he’s not far off, as he stokes her awakening womanhood and then absconds with her for a hedonistic traipse across Europe. Sex is a vigorous and rewarding wonderment to Bella, an act she refers to as “furious jumping,” through which she proves to be quite the vessel of female empowerment and independence, disappointed nearly to the point of scolding Duncan when he can’t go another round, and unabashed about receiving another man’s attentions and more. “Poor Things” could be taken as “Fear of Flying” before there were airplanes. What began as an uneasy predatory play by Duncan gets inverted and twisted, as Bella’s backstory comes to light in carefully meted strokes.
For the fabric of such a phantasmagoric yarn Lanthimos has stitched together a dark fairytale coverlet evocative of all things Tim Burton with the Kafka-esque surreality of “The Lobster” or “Dogtooth.” In Portugal, zeppelinlike sky trams float overhead, barely tethered to wispy wired tracks; and later, on a cruise, waves crest in pastel rolls of opulence; then there’s the Parisian brothel Bella takes up employment in endowed with a seemingly endless maze of antechambers – secret doors behind secret doors.
“Poor Things” registers a stunning visual achievement that one-ups itself continually. But if not for the heroic, all-in effort by the cast, Lanthimos’ toil might have been all for naught. Youssef and Dafoe make subtle yet critical contributions as cuck and creator; Ruffalo owns his part with amiable smarm and a faint vestige of vulnerability Not enough can be said about Stone and her evolution from grunting child inserted into an adult’s body to stirred woman with no regard for the patriarchy who is, as a result, free to skirt its curtails and checks. The lens on men behaving badly – and well – is intriguing, especially when the action comes home to roost and proves that Duncan isn’t the worst card in the deck. The ending may be a bit too neat, but the sojourn of Bella’s awakening is full of surprise.
The latest from Emerald Fennell, who stirred things up with “Promising Young Woman” (2020), is a slow burn of a psychological thriller with hot, homoerotic embers – à la “The Talented Mr. Ripley” – that catch fire every now and then. It’s also the second film this year in which Mother Nature’s cyclical purge of fertility during an act of oral pleasure plays for bloody spectacle – the other being Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play,” streaming on Netflix. There’s much about class and privilege in this dark semi-comedy starring Barry Keoghan, tripling down on strange doings after “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017) and “The Green Knight” (2021) as a poor student at Oxford who can’t afford school attire but syncs up with the “it” boy Felix (Jacob Elordi, who’s had a banner year with this arresting performance as Elvis in “Priscilla”; Timothy Chalamet, you’ve got competition!).
Felix lives in the glorious British estate of the film’s title – a real-life keep that’s not far off from Balmoral or the Palace at Versailles – and invites Keoghan’s Oliver Quick (what a name) back to the estate for summer break. At first Oliver seems in awe of Felix’s family (Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant, dutiful as the parents, and Alison Oliver as their capricious and observant daughter), but then there are late-night doings by the pond and a “Shining”-like maze. As Oliver starts to shed his skin, matters shift to sexual knowing, station-in-life resentments, reveals and ensuing grim events.
It’s an ambitious go for Fennell, well framed and well acted (Carey Mulligan, who headlined “Promising Young Woman,” is in it for a blip, and piquantly hard to glean), but as the saga moves toward the third act, things turn hyperbolic and unbelievable, edging on the inane. There is a bit of a reprieve before the denouement that snaps you back in, but that herky-jerkiness is undeniable. The film will only add to Keoghan’s rise in creepy sociopathic appeal, and Fennell will again have art house audiences eager to see what she does next.
When you think of the films of Ridley Scott, it’s most likely his early sci-fi classics “Alien” (1979) and “Blade Runner” (1982), but the prolific filmmaker’s first effort, “The Duelists” (1977), was a period piece set in France during the Napoleonic wars. In that film (not to be confused with “The Last Duel” from 2021, which Scott made with local guys Ben and Matt), the French emperor’s presence was felt constantly, but Napoleon himself never steps into the frame; it’s with a daub of poetic justice that Scott, nearly 50 years later and with a budget almost 200 times bigger, gets to deliver a biopic epic centered on the historically notorious icon known as much for his hubris and the self-esteem complex named after his alleged diminutive stature and inflammable ego as for his military gamesmanship.
As Napoleon, the usually reliable Joaquin Phoenix (“Beau is Afraid,”“You Were Never Really Here”) feels somewhat subdued. That said, it is intriguing to see him reunite with Scott some 22 years after “Gladiator,” in which Phoenix also played a self-absorbed ruler – a deliciously sniveling fop of a Roman emperor. What’s missing is some of the entitled, mercurial and Oscar-winning zing baked into his mirthless Gotham ghoul in “Joker” (2019).
The film opens with Napoleon witnessing the beheading of Marie Antoinette. The French Revolution is in full swing, and the British are looking to gain a bigger foothold across the channel. To prove his worth to the new republic, Napoleon leads the fierce and tactically astute Siege of Toulon, where underpowered French forces take out a well-ensconced British fort under the cloak of night. It doesn’t help that the Brits are in the midst of sweeping, drunken merriment and caught with their pants down, literally.
Thus begins Napoleon’s ascent from military marksman to iron-fisted ruler as one part of the French Consulate triumvirate and later emperor, and efforts to expand the French empire into Africa and Eastern Europe take hold as well as the long-simmering desire to crush the hated English and their hold on the seas (see “Master and Commander”). The main threads of Scott’s film, penned by David Scarpa (“Man in the High Castle” and Scott’s “All the Money in the World”) focus on Bonaparte’s obsession with besting Russian Tsar Alexander I (Édouard Philipponnat), a handsome man-boy that Napoleon seems to hold in deference, and his capricious relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). Scott’s orchestration of the Battle of Austerlitz, where Napoleon takes it to Russian and Austrian forces (also called the Battle of Three Emperors), as well as the infamous, post-Elba exile grudge match, Waterloo, are stunning in scope, choreography and gritty grandeur. Kirby, who plays the White Widow in the “Mission: Impossible” films, is no stranger to strong women and fills those shoes well here, yet the relationship and the tempo of its tears and folds is wildly uneven – which is not on Kirby, to say the least. Kirby portrays a woman whose confidence and sensuality are more than worthy of holding the gaze of a man with limitless power and, as a result, after their marriage implodes because of heir matters, remains a regularly sought confidant, counsel and simmering longing. The sex scenes have a cheeky silliness, not too far off from some of Scott’s work with Cameron Diaz and a racy sports coupe in “The Counselor” (2013) and most recently Lady Gaga and Adam Driver in “The House of Gucci” (2021).
Beyond the major battles – epic with a capital “E” – and sticking to the historic record, Scott and Scarpa don’t let Bonaparte off the hook for his actions. His Ahab-esque quests cost needless lives, something the film registers as clearly and coldly as the hoar of the harsh Russian winter. As far as the size thing goes, the record shows Napoleon at just north of 5-foot-6; it’s rumored that the Corsican (a lesser, looked-down-upon ilk to most French noblemen at the time) was surrounded intentionally by taller, statuesque guardsmen. Scott and Scarpa wisely choose not to delve into the matter, but Scott often shoots down on Bonaparte, or up from his POV, lending to the effect.
The picture, which holds one’s eye throughout the 157-minute running time, is opulent but bears the jerky unevenness of Scott’s “Gucci.” Perhaps a Thanksgiving Day viewing will leave visual feasters of all things Napoleonic hungry and searching the streaming universe for the timeless 1927 treasure of the same name crafted by Abel Gance. Seek it out and enjoy the treat. It’s not an either-or, mind you, as Gance’s tale tells of a young Napoleon in school and his early days in the military, dovetailing nicely in time to where Scott’s vision starts.
For What it's Worth 