Long, overindulgent and absolutely riveting, the first feature film by Harvard grad Joshua Oppenheimer is hard to make heads or tails of as it explores life after the end of the world. The cinematic visionary who blew audiences away with his imaginative documentaries on the Indonesian death squads of the 1960s (“The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” both Oscar nominated) saddles up with Tilda Swinton, it boy George McKay of “1917” – already having a banner year with “The Beast” and the hard-hitting “Femme” to his credit – and Michael Shannon, who starred in the similarly themed, “Take Shelter” (2011). They play Mother, Son and Father, respectively. Along with “Nightbitch,” also currently in theaters, this no-name concept seems to be the arthouse convention du jour.
We catch up with the trio living the posh life in a bunker a half-mile underground after the rest of the world has been burned to a crisp. The shelter is in the labyrinth of an abandoned salt mine bought presciently decades ago by Father, a former oil exec (who, by proximity, had a hand in the incineration of humankind). Son was born in the bowels of that salt mine, and the well-tended-to trio are not alone in their enclave. With them are a doctor (Lennie James, “The Walking Dead”), a cook (Bronagh Gallagher) and a butler (Tim McInnerny, “Gladiator II”). Everything for the most is safe and good, and their biggest discomfort is the bitter sourness of the wine they vinify. Then an interloper drops in – almost literally. The arrival of the young woman known as Girl (Moses Ingram) is not welcomed. Mother and Father have a xenophobic policy and initially restrain and restrict Girl; eventually they admit her into their midst, where as you can guess, sexual tensions with Son rise quickly and cause social dynamics and routines to shift.
Did I mention that “The End” – not to be confused with the similarly titled and themed 2013 film “This is the End” starring Jonah Hill and James Franco – is a musical? For his two Indonesian hit-squad docs, Oppenheimer stepped outside the boundaries of nonnarrative convention and gave former squad leaders resources (money and cameras) to make their own films depicting their recollection of their parts in the bloody overthrow. One made a garish musical with former killers dressed in drag and singing alongside the cascading waters of a grand waterfall. Could that have been the inspiration for the cast of “The End” to break into song in the dusty corridors of a salt mine? The probability is too overwhelming to deny.
The overall fabric of “The End” is not too far from L.Q. Jones’s postapocalyptic“A Boy and His Dog” (1975), in which Don Johnson as that “boy” discovers an underground Eden and ultimately upends an order serving mostly an elite few. Besides the gender role swap, the other notable delta between the films is the causality for eradication – global nuclear annihilation or human-triggered climate change catastrophes. Oppenheimer doesn’t harangue the audience by climbing onto the climate change pulpit, a theme more clearly held off in the corner of the frame. For his microsociety, there’s no wrestling with what-ifs, because it’s already happened, but members have guilt and admit to things they did that led to the perishing of others.
Given the texture of his films, it’s clear that the cleansing power of confession is something that drives Oppenheimer – it was the thing he sought to educe from Indonesian militia leaders after decades of denial. The result in those films was stunning, emotionally impactful and horrific; here, narrative artifice diminishes that impact, but “The End” is effectual in its own right. It is gorgeously framed and shot, with near period-piece delicacy, and the performers create sharp characters and prove quite capable when dropping into song. The offset between Swinton’s subtle, ethereal otherworldliness and Shannon’s gruff bristle takes a while to digest, but serves the film well. “The End” does go on a bit too long for the concept, but effectively provokes with themes of isolationism, empowered entitlement and one’s responsibility to a fellow human, as well as stewardship of the vast blue orb we’ve indelibly infected through negligence and avarice.
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.
At one juncture in Christopher Nolan’s last outing, the mind-bending, time-rewinding spy thriller “Tenet” (2020), a scientist in the future able to weaponize and manipulate the past to alter history is likened to J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist at the Manhattan Project, which produced the nuclear warhead that in effect ended World War II. Foreshadowing for this next project?
That future scientist killed themselves to take their secrets with them and prevent further ripples in time; Oppenheimer, as the Cold War set in, became outspoken against nuclear proliferation and subsequently – with the help of FBI dirty trickster J. Edgar Hoover – had his security clearance revoked by the Atomic Energy Commission. It didn’t help that his wife, lover and several other personal associates had ties to the American Communist Party.
Nolan began work on his “Oppenheimer” in January, shortly after the Biden administration conferred public wrongdoing on the AEC and U.S. government for its lack of process and credible evidence against Oppenheimer, who died in 1967 at the age of 62.
The film plays loyally to its roots, the 2005 biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, and 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 and 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; 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.
Nolan is a filmmaker who likes to play with time – the brilliant weaving of three timelines that converge at singular moment in “Dunkirk” (2017) as well as “Tenet” and “Memento” (2000) – and works another triptych here: the race to build the atomic bomb before the Nazis at the Las Alamos complex (something of a Western mining town) in the middle of the New Mexican desert; Oppenheimer’s 1954 hearing before the AEC inside a cramped conference room; and the senate proceedings on Eisenhower’s secretary of commerce nominee Lewis Strauss, who had been Oppenheimer’s boss at the commission. The clear but kinetic interweaving that frames the Strauss hearings in black and white and the rest in color is eerily evocative of Oliver Stone’s energetically edited and sharply acted bit of nearby history, “JFK” (1991); in “Oppenheimer,” that then-junior senator from Massachusetts poetically has a small hand in one of the three timelines.
“Oppenheimer” for the most is a deeply internal film, and Nolan deepens our access to Oppenheimer’s mental and emotional state with tearaways to stars colliding in the cold dark universe, people in a celebratory audience suddenly melting in a hot white light and, at one point during his AEC security access hearing, sex with his lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, fantastic in the small part) and him confessing to the tryst to his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt, fantastic in a larger part). The soul-rattling aural immersion and meticulous imagery by Nolan regulars composer Ludwig Göransson and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, as well as an ace team effort by the sound department, fill out the spectacular, collective achievement. The cast beyond Murphy and Robert Downey Jr., who manages to make the eely Strauss human, is a long list of potential competing supporting-actor award nods, starting with Matt Damon as general (to be) Lesley Groves, who oversees the Manhattan Project and gets to deliver a fiery back-and-forth that’s almost on par with his indelible rant in “Good Will Hunting” (1997). Also notable are director Benny Safdie (“Uncut Gems,” “Good Time”) as H-bomb scientist Edward Teller; Josh “where have you been?” Hartnett solid as Oppenheimer’s department mate at Berkeley, Ernest Lawrence; Kenneth Branagh as physicist Niels Bohr; Jason Clarke, insidious as AEC special counsel Roger Robb; and Tom Conti (another “where have you been?”) avuncular and dead on as Albert Einstein. The list goes on. Less effective are Casey Affleck as military investigator Boris Pash interrogating Oppenheimer and Gary Oldman as President Harry Truman.
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 (thought 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 taking 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?” I wouldn’t want to call them Easter eggs, but …
As to Oppenheimer’s initial reluctance to signing onto the Manhattan Project due to the potential moral and historical implications, one fellow Jewish colleague says, “We don’t know if we can’t trust ourselves with it, but we know we can’t trust the Nazis.” A point well taken, with added personal appeal. Later, after the Germans have been defeated and Truman drops the two bombs, he justifies it by saying it saved American lives and allowed him “to bring our boys home.” Truman, like Strauss, comes off as a bit of a runaway ego (he calls Oppenheimer a “crybaby” when not quite out of earshot) and the film poses whether the bombings were necessary. It’s another good pique, and a complex one for me – this was when my father, a teenage member of the 101st Airborne, had just finished his service in Europe and was on a slow boat to Japan. Heavy stuff all around.
Rewinding back to “Tenet,” Nolan’s tightly controlled 2020 release during the height of the pandemic and the first big theatrical release at a time we were still in masks, eating outside under heater lamps and spaced apart in theaters. That release signaled the revival of the filmgoing biz and a return to normal; with “Oppenheimer” we have Hollywood writers and actors on strike, which could mark a notable damper to the release schedule come holiday season and beyond. For now we have “Oppenheimer,” which is more than a movie or a just a biopic; it’s an immersed contemplation on destiny, control and power, and obligations to the future. Looking at the political shenanigans then and now, it’s easy to see where we came from and where we are. “Oppenheimer” may not quite be an American history lesson, but it is most certainly an American fable.
A scene from Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Look of Silence.” (Courtesy Drafthouse Films and Participant Media)
“The Look of Silence,” the new movie from filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, delves into the same period of bloody unrest that marred Indonesia in the mid-1960s that his highly lauded 2012 documentary, “The Act of Killing” plumbed, but from an entirely different angle.
“Killing,” which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, allowed the sadistic perpetrators behind the mass executions to put their own spin on their unconscionable deeds, but not without Oppenheimer’s subtle, yet biting illumination of the heinous nature of their transgressions and the unrighteous impunity they received from a capitulating government looking to bury the past and move on. “Silence,” by stark contrast, is the salving counter flow to “Killing,” a cathartic podium for the survivors and family of the victims who live with daily reminders of the ghastly past and the constant duress of a reoccurrence.
How Oppenheimer arrived at such a place of riveting paradox, ghostly horrors and egregious complacency is almost as compelling a story as the ones told in his films and the tumultuous history of the Islamic archipelago. As a college graduate in his 20s, Oppenheimer signed on with the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers to make a documentary somewhere in a developing nation to highlight workers’ rights violations on plantations and mass producing farms.
“It could have been anywhere,” the filmmaker recalls, “you’d think South America or Africa, but I went to Indonesia.” While working on the documentary Oppenheimer found it difficult to get the workers, who were working under what the director calls “slave-like conditions,” to open up. “There were these thugs there that kept silencing them. The workers were really fearful and when someone finally said something they told me about 1965.”
Oppenheimer who studied filmmaking at Harvard and resides in Copenhagen, admittedly (at the time) didn’t know the full extent of the atrocities that lay in Indonesia’s bloody past. Back in the mid-1940s, the Dutch colony won its independence from the Netherlands after the island was released by the Japanese at the end of the Second World War. Its first president, Sukarno, a galvanizing hand in the quest for independence, would lead the country for nearly 20 years until the September 30th Movement, an attempted coup allegedly initiated by the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) — there has been speculation of a plot from within the military — that would send the island nation into turmoil — something that the gripping historical drama, “The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982), starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, captured quite well. Continue reading →
For What it's Worth 