New York Film Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

BONG JOON-HO: PARASITE 기생충 (Gisaengchung) (2019)


LEE SON-KYUN AND JO YEO-JEONG IN PARASITE

Crime thriller as social commentary? Maybe not.

I've reviewed Bong's 2006 The Host ("a monster movie with a populist heart and political overtones that's great fun to watch") and his 2009 Mother which I commented had "too many surprises." (I also reviewed his 2013 Snowpiercer.) Nothing is different here except this seems to be being taken more seriously as social commentary, though it's primarily an elaborately plotted and cunningly realized violent triller, as well a monster movie where the monsters are human. It's also marred by being over long and over-plotted, making its high praise seem a bit excessive.

This new film, Bong's first in a while made at home and playing with national social issues, is about a deceitful poor family that infiltrates a rich one. It won the top award at Cannes in May 2019, just a year after the Japanese Koreeda's (more subtle and more humanistic) Palm winner about the related theme of a crooked poor family. Parasite has led to different comparisons, such as Losey's The Servant and Pasolini's Theorem. In accepting the prize, Bong himself gave a nod to Hitchcock and Chabrol. Parasite has met with nearly universal acclaim, though some critics feel it is longer and more complicated than necessary and crude in its social commentary, if its contrasting families really adds up to that. The film is brilliantly done and exquisitely entertaining half the way. Then it runs on too long and acquires an unwieldiness that makes it surprisingly flawed for a film so heaped with praise.

It's strange to compare Parasite with Losey's The Servant, in which Dick Bogarde and James Fox deliver immensely rich performances. Losey's film is a thrillingly slow-burn, subtle depiction of class interpenetration, really a psychological study that works with class, not a pointed statement about class itself. It's impossible to speak of The Servant and Parasite in the same breath.

In Parasite one can't help but enjoy the ultra-rich family's museum-piece modernist house, the score, and the way the actors are handled, but one keeps coming back to the fact that as Steven Dalton simply puts it in his Cannes Hollywood Reporter review, Parasite is "cumbersomely plotted" and "heavy-handed in its social commentary." Yet I had to go to that extremist and contrarian Armond White in National Review for a real voice of dissent. I don't agree with White's politics or his belief that Stephen Chow is a master filmmaker, but I do sympathize with being out-of-tune, like him, with all the praise of Boon's new film.

The contrast between the poor and rich family is blunt indeed, but the posh Park family doesn't seem unsubtly depicted: they're absurdly overprivileged, but don't come off as bad people. Note the con-artist Kim family's acknowledgement of this, and the mother's claim that being rich allows you to be nice, that money is like an iron that smooths out the wrinkles. This doesn't seem to be about that, mainly. It's an ingeniously twisted story of a dangerous game, and a very wicked one. Planting panties in the car to mark the chauffeur as a sexual miscreant and get him fired: not nice. Stimulating the existing housekeeper's allergy and then claiming she has TB so she'll be asked to leave: dirty pool. Not to mention before that, bringing in the sister as somebody else's highly trained art therapist relative, when all the documents are forged and the "expertise" is cribbed off the internet: standard con artistry.

The point is that the whole Kim family makes its way into the Park family's employ and intimate lives, but it is essential that they conceal that they are in any way related to each other. What Bong and his co-writer Jin Won Han are after is the depiction of a dangerous con game, motivated by poverty and greed, that titillates us with the growing risk of exposure. The film's scene-setting of the house and family is exquisite. The extraordinary house is allowed to do most of the talking. The rich family and the housekeeper are sketched in with a few deft stokes. One's only problem is first, the notion that this embodies socioeconomic commentary, and second, the overreach of the way the situation is played out, with one unnecessary coda after another till every possibility is exhausted. This is watchable and entertaining (till it's not), but it's not the stuff of a top award.

Parasite 기생충 (Gisaengchung), 132 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, winning the Palme d'Or best picture award. Twenty-eight other festivals followed as listed on IMDb, including New York, for which it was screened (at IFC Center Oct. 11, 2019) for the present review. Current Metascore 95%. It has opened in various countries including France, where the AlloCiné press rating soared to 4.8.


PARK SO-DAM AND CHOI WOO-SIK IN PARASITE

[Chris Knipp]

EDWARD NORTON: MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (2019)


GUGU MBATHA-RAW AND EDWARD NORTON IN MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

Edward Norton's passion project complicates the Jonathan Lethem novel

The NYFF Closing Night film is the premiere of Edwards Norton's adaptation, a triumph over many creative obstacles through a nine-year development time, of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 eponymous novel. It concerns Lionel Essrog (played by Norton), a man with Tourette's Syndrome who gets entangled in a police investigation using the obsessive and retentive mind that comes with his condition to solve the mystery. Much of the film, especially the first half, is dominated by Lionel's jerky motions and odd repetitive outbursts, for which he continually apologizes. Strange hero, but Lethem's creation. To go with the novel's evocation of Maltese Falcon style noir flavor, Norton has recast it from modern times to the Fifties.

Leading cast members, besides Norton himself, are Willem Dafoe, Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Cherry Jones, Bobby Cannavale and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. In his recasting of the novel, as Peter Debruge explains in his Variety review, Norton makes as much use of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, about the manipulative city planner Robert Moses, a "visionary" insensitive to minorities and the poor, as of Lethem's book. Alec Baldwn's "Moses Randolph" role represents the film's Robert Moses character, who is added into the world of the original novel.

Some of the plot line may become obscure in the alternating sources of the film. But clearly Lionel Essrog, whose nervous sensibility hovers over things in Norton's voiceover, is a handicapped man with an extra ability who's one of four orphans from Saint Vincent's Orphanage in Brooklyn saved by Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), who runs a detective agency. When Minna is offed by the Mob in the opening minutes of the movie, Lionel goes chasing. Then he learns city bosses had a hand, and want to repress his efforts.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw's character, Laura Rose, who becomes a kind of love interest for Lionel Essrog, and likewise willem Dafoe's, Paul Randolph, Moses' brother and opponent, are additional key characters in the film not in the Johathan Lethem book. The cinematography is by the Mike Leigh regular (who produced the exquisite Turner), Dick Pope. He provides a lush, classic look.

Viewers will have to decide if this mixture of novel, non-fiction book and period recasting works for them or not. For many the problem is inherent in the Lethem novel, that it's a detective story where, as the original Times reviewer Albert Mobilio said, "solving the crime is beside the point." Certainly Norton has created a rich mixture, and this is a "labour of love," "as loving as it is laborious, maybe," is how the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw put it, writing (generally quite favorably) from Toronto. In her intro piece for the first part of the New York Film Festival for the Times Manohla Dargis linked it with the difficult Albert Serra'S Liberté with a one-word reaction: "oof," though she complemented these two as "choices rather than just opportunistically checked boxes." Motherless Brooklyn has many reasons for wanting to be in the New York Film Festival, and for the honor of Closing Night Film, notably the personal passion, but also the persistent rootedness in New York itself through these permutations.

Motherless Brooklyn, 144 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2019, showing at eight other festivals including Toronto, Vancouver, Mill Valley, and New York, where it was screened at the NYFF OCT. 11, 2019 as the Closing Night film. It opens theatrically in the US Nov. 1, 2019. Current Metascore 60%.

[Chris Knipp]

[Found also in Filmleaf's Festival Coverage section for the 2019 NYFF]

MARTIN SCORSESE: THE IRISHMAN (2019)


AL PACINO AND ROBERT DE NIRO IN THE IRISHMAN

Old song

From Martin Scorsese, who is in his late seventies, comes a major feature that is an old man's film. It's told by an old man, about old men, with old actors digitized (indifferently) to look like and play their younger selves as well. It's logical that The Irishman, about Teamsters loyalist and mob hit man Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who became the bodyguard and then (as he tells it) the assassin of Union kingpin Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) should have been chosen as Opening Night Film of the New York Film Festival. Scorsese is very New York, even if the film is set in Detroit. He is also a good friend of Film at Lincoln Center. And a great American director with an impressive body of work behind him.

To be honest, I am not a fan of Scorsese's feature films. I do not like them. They are unpleasant, humorless, laborious and cold. I admire his responsible passion for cinema and incestuous knowledge of it. I do like his documentaries. From Fran Lebowitz's talk about the one he made about her, I understand what a meticulous, obsessive craftsman he is in all his work. He also does have a sense of humor. See how he enjoys Fran's New York wit in Public Speaking. And there is much deadpan humor in The Irishman at the expense of the dimwitted, uncultured gangsters it depicts. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian's script based on Charles Brandt's book about Sheeran concocts numerous droll deadpan exchanges. It's a treat belatedly to see De Niro and Pacino acting together for the first time in extended scenes.

The Irishman is finely crafted and full of ideas and inspires many thoughts. But I found it monotonous and overlong - and frankly overrated. American film critics are loyal. Scorsese is an icon, and they feel obligated, I must assume, to worship it. He has made a big new film in his classic gangster vein, so it must be great. The Metascore, 94%, nonetheless is an astonishment. Review aggregating is not a science, but the makers of these scores seem to have tipped the scales. At least I hope more critics have found fault with The Irishman than that. They assign 80% ratings to some reviews that find serious fault, and supply only one negative one (Austin Chronicle, Richard Whittaker). Of course Armond White trashes the movie magnificently in National Review ("Déjà Vu Gangsterism"), but that's outside the mainstream mediocre media pale.

Other Scorsese stars join De Niro and Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel. This is a movie of old, ugly men. Even in meticulously staged crowd scenes, there is not one young or handsome face. Women are not a factor, not remotely featured as in Jonathan Demme's delightful Married to the Mob. There are two wives often seen, in the middle distance, made up and coiffed to the kitsch nines, in expensive pants suits, taking a cigarette break on car trips - it's a thing. But they don't come forward as characters. Note also that out of loyalty to his regulars, Scorsese uses an Italo-American actor to play an Irish-American. There's a far-fetched explanation of Frank's knowledge of Italian, but his Irishness doesn't emerge - just another indication of how monochromatic this movie is.

It's a movie though, ready to serve a loyal audience with ritual storytelling and violence, providing pleasures in its $140 million worth of production values in period feel, costumes, and snazzy old cars (though I still long for a period movie whose vehicles aren't all intact and shiny). This is not just a remake. Its very relentlessness in showing Frank's steady increments of slow progress up the second-tier Teamsters and mafia outsider functionary ladders is something new. But it reflects Scorsese's old worship of toughs and wise guys and seeming admiration for their violence.

I balk at Scorsese's representing union goons and gangsters as somehow heroic and tragic. Metacritic's only critic of the film, Richard Whittiker of the Austen Chronicle, seems alone in recognizing that this is not inevitable. He points out that while not "lionizing" mobsters, Scorsese still "romanticizes" them as "flawed yet still glamorous, undone by their own hubris." Whittiker - apparently alone in this - compares this indulgent touch with how the mafia is shown in "the Italian poliziotteschi," Italian Years of Lead gang films that showed them as "boors, bullies, and murderers, rather than genteel gentlemen who must occasionally get their hands dirty and do so oh-so-begrudgingly." Whittiker calls Scorsese's appeal to us to feel Sheeran's "angst" when he's being flown in to kill "his supposed friend" (Hoffa) "a demand too far."

All this reminded me of a richer 2019 New York Film Festival mafia experience, Marco Bellocchio's The Traitor/Il traditore, the epic, multi-continent story of Tommaso Buscetta, the first big Italian mafia figure who chose to turn state's witness. This is a gangster tale that has perspective, both morally and historically. And I was impressed that Pierfrancesco Favino, the star of the film, who gives a career-best performance as Buscetta, strongly urged us both before and after the NYFF public screening to bear in mind that these mafiosi are small, evil, stupid men. Coppola doesn't see that, but he made a glorious American gangster epic with range and perspective. In another format, so did David Chase om the 2000-2007 HBO epic, "The Sopranos." Scprsese has not done so. Monotonously, and at overblown length, he has once again depicted Italo-Americans as gangsters, and (this time) unions as gangs of thugs.

The Irishman, 209 mins,. debuted at New York as Opening Night Film; 15 other international festivals, US theatrical release Nov. 1, wide release in many countries online by Netflix Nov. 27. Metascore 94%.

[Chris Knipp]

KLEBER MENDOÇA FILHO, JULIANO DORNELLES: BACURAU (2019)


SONIA BRAGA (CENTER) IN BACURAU

Not just another Cannes mistake?

This is a bold film for an arthouse filmmaker to produce, and it has moments of rawness and unpredictability that are admirable. But it seems at first hand to be possibly a misstep both for the previously much subtler chronicler of social and political unease as seen in the 2011 Neighboring Sopunds and 2016 Aquarius, Kleber Mendonça Filho, and for Cannes, which may have awarded novelty rather than mastery in giving it half of the 2019 Jury Prize. It's a movie that excites and then delivers a series of scenes of growing disappointment and repugnance. But I'm not saying it won't surprise and awe you.

Let's begin with where we are, which is the Brazilian boonies. Bacurau was filmed in the village of Barra in the municipality of Parelhas and in the rural area of the municipality of Acari, at the Sertão do Seridó region, in Rio Grande do Norte. Mendonça Filho shares credit this time with his regular production designer Juliano Dornelles. (They both came originally from this general region, is one reason.) The Wikipedia article introduces it as a "Brazilian weird western film" and its rural shootout, its rush of horses, its showdowns, and its truckload of coffins may indeed befit that peculiar genre.

How are we to take the action? In his Hollywood Reporter review, Stephen Dalton surprises me by asserting that this third narrative feature "strikes a lighter tone" than the first two and combines "sunny small-town comedy with a fable-like plot" along with "a sprinkle of magic realism." This seems an absurdly watered down description, but the film is many things to many people because it embodies many things. In an interview with Emily Buder, Mendoça Filho himself describes it as a mix of "spaghetti Western, '70's sci-fi, social realist drama, and political satire."

The film feels real enough to be horrifying, but it enters risky sci-fi horror territory with its futuristic human hunting game topic, which has been mostly an area for schlock. (See a list of ten, with the 1932 Most Dangerous Game given as the trailblazer.) However, we have to acknowledge that Mendonca Filho is smart enough to know all this and may want to use the schlock format for his own sophisticated purpose. But despite Mike D'Angelo's conclusion on Letterboxd that the film may "require a second viewing following extensive reading" due to its rootedness in Brazilian politics, the focus on American imperialists and brutal outside exploiters from the extreme right isn't all that hard to grasp.

Bacurau starts off as if it means to be an entertainment, with conventional opening credits and a pleasant pop song celebrating Brazil, but that is surely ironic. A big water truck rides in rough, arriving with three bullet holes spewing agua that its driver hasn't noticed. (The road was bumpy.) There is a stupid, corrupt politician, mayor Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima), who is complicit in robbing local areas of their water supply and who gets a final comeuppance. The focus is on Bacurau, a little semi-abandoned town in the north whose 94-year-old matriarch Carmelita dies and gets a funeral observation in which the whole town participates, though apart the ceremony's strange magic realist aspects Sonia Braga, as a local doctor called Domingas, stages a loud scene because she insists that the deceased woman was evil. Then, with some, including Carmelita's granddaughter Teresa (Barbara Colen), returned to town from elsewhere, along with the handsome Pacote (Tomaso Aquinas) and a useful psychotic local killer and protector of water rights called Lunga (Silvero Pereira), hostile outsiders arrive, though as yet unseen. Their forerunners are a colorfully costumed Brazilian couple in clownish spandex suits on dustrider motorcycles who come through the town. When they're gone, it's discovered seven people have been shot.

They were an advance crew for a gang of mostly American white people headed by Michael (Udo Kier), whose awkward, combative, and finally murderous conference we visit. This is a bad scene in more ways than one: it's not only sinister and racist, but clumsy, destroying the air of menace and unpredictability maintained in the depiction of Bacurau scenes. But we learn the cell phone coverage of the town has been blocked, it is somehow not included on maps, and communications between northern and southern Brazil are temporarily suspended, so the setting is perfect for this ugly group to do what they've come for, kill locals for sport using collectible automatic weapons. Overhead there is a flying-saucer-shaped drone rumbling in English. How it functions isn't quite clear, but symbolically it refers to American manipulation from higher up. The way the rural area is being choked off requires no mention of Brazil's new right wing strong man Jair Bolsonaro and the Amazonian rain forest.

"They're not going to kill a kid," I said as a group of local children gather, the most normal, best dressed Bacurauans on screen so far, and play a game of dare as night falls to tease us, one by one creeping as far as they can into the dark. But sure enough, a kid gets shot. At least even the bad guys agree this was foul play. And the bad guys get theirs, just as in a good Western. But after a while, the action seems almost too symbolically satisfying - though this is achieved with good staging and classic visual flair through zooms, split diopter effects, Cinemascope, and other old fashioned techniques.

I'm not the only one finding Bacurau intriguing yet fearing that it winds up being confused and all over the place. It would work much better if it were dramatically tighter. Peter DeBruge in Variety notes that the filmakers "haven’t figured out how to create that hair-bristling anticipation of imminent violence that comes so naturally to someone like Quentin Tarantino." Mere vague unexpectedness isn't scary, and all the danger and killing aren't wielded as effectively as they should be to hold our attention and manipulate our emotions.

Bacurau, 131 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, where it tied for the Jury Prize with the French film, Ladj Ly's Les misérables. Many other awards and at least 31 other festivals including the NYFF. Metascore 74%. AlloCiné press rating 3.8, with a rare rave from Cahiers du Cinéma. US theatrical distribution by Kino Lorber began Mar. 13, 2020, but due to general theater closings caused by the coronavirus pandemic the company launched a "virtual theatrical exhibition initiative," Kino Marquee, with this film from Mar. 19.

[Chris Knipp]

BERTRAND BONELLO: ZOMBI CHILD (2019)


LOUISE LABEQUE AND WISLANDA LOUIMAT (FAR RIGHT) IN ZOMBI CHILD

Voodoo comes to Paris

If you said Betrand Bonello's films are beautiful, sexy, and provocative you would not be wrong. This new, officially fifth feature (I've still not seen his first one, the 2008 On War), has those elements. Its imagery, full of deep contrasts, can only be described as lush. Its intertwined narrative is puzzling as well.

We're taken right away to Haiti and plunged into the world of voodoo and zombies. Ground powder from the cut-up body of a blowfish is dropped, unbeknownst to him, into a man's shoes. Walking in them, he soon falters and falls. Later, he's aroused from death to the half-alive state of a zombie - and pushed into a numb, helpless labor in the hell of a a sugar cane field with other victims of the same cruel enchantment. In time however something arouses him to enough life to escape.

Some of the Haitian sequences center around a moonlit cemetery whose large tombs seem airy and haunted and astonishingly grand for what we know as the poorest country in the hemisphere.

From the thumping, vibrant ceremonies of Haitian voodoo (Bonello's command of music is always fresh and astonishing as his images are lush and beautiful) we're rushed to the grandest private boarding school you've ever seen, housed in vast stone government buildings. This noble domaine was established by Napoleon Bonaparte on the edge of Paris, in Saint Denis, for the education of children of recipients of the Legion of Honor. It really exists, and attendance there is still on an honorary basis.

Zombi Child oscillates between girls in this very posh Parisian school and people in Haiti. But these are not wholly separate places. A story about a Haitian grandfather (the zombie victim, granted a second life) and his descendants links the two strains. It turns out one of those descendants, Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat), is a new student at the school. A white schoolgirl, Fanny (the dreamy Louise Labeque), who's Mélissa's friend and sponsors her for membership in a sorority, while increasingly possessed by a perhaps imaginary love, also bridges the gap. For the sorority admission Mélissa confesses the family secret of a zombi and voodoo knowledge in her background.

Thierry Méranger of Cahiers du Cinéma calls this screenplay "eminently Bonellian in its double orientation," its "interplay of echoes" between "radically different" worlds designed to "stimulate the spectator's reflection." Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times bluntly declares that it's meant to "interrogate the bitter legacy of French colonialism."

But how so? And if so, this could be a tricky proposition. On NPR Andrew Lapin was partly admiring of how "cerebral and slippery" the film is, but suggests that since voodoo and zombies are all most white people "already know" about Haitian culture, a director coming from Haiti's former colonizing nation (France) must do "a lot of legwork to use these elements successfully in a "fable" where "the real horror is colonialism." The posh school comes from Napoleon, who coopted the French revolution, and class scenes include a history professor lecturing on this and how "liberalism obscures liberty."

I'm more inclined to agree with Glenn Kenny's more delicately worded praise in his short New York Times review of the film where he asserts that the movie’s inconclusiveness is the source of its appeal. Zombi Child, he says, is fueled by insinuation and fascination. The fascination, the potent power, of the occult, that's what Haiti has that the first wold lacks.

One moment made me authentically jump, but Bonello isn't offering a conventional horror movie. He's more interested in making his hints of voodoo's power and attraction, even for the white lovelorn schoolgirl, seem as convincing as his voodoo ceremonies, both abroad and back in Haiti, feel thoroughly attractive, or scary, and real. These are some of the best voodoo scenes in a movie. This still may seem like a concoction to you. Its enchantments were more those of the luxuriant imagery, the flowing camerawork, the delicious use of moon- and candle-light, the beautiful people, of whatever color. This is world-class filmmaking even if it's not Bonello's best work.

Bonello stages things, gets his actors to live them completely, then steps back and lets it happen. Glenn Kenny says his "hallmark" is his "dreamy detachment." My first look at that was the 2011 House of Tolerence (L'Apollonide - mémoires de la maison close), which I saw in Paris, a languorous immersion in a turn-of-the-century Parisian brothel, intoxicating, sexy, slightly repugnant. Next came his most ambitious project, Saint Laurent(2014), focused on a very druggy period in the designer's career and a final moment of decline. He has said this became a kind of matching panel for Apollonide. (You'll find that in an excellent long Q&A after the NYFF screening.) Saint Laurent's "forbidden" (unsanctioned) picture of the fashion house is as intoxicating, vibrant, and cloying as the maison close, with its opium, champagne, disfigurement and syphilis. No one can say Gaspard Ulliel wasn't totally immersed in his performance. Nocturama (2016) takes a group of wild young people who stage a terrorist act in Paris, who seem to run aground in a posh department store at the end, Bonello again getting intense action going and then seeming to leave it to its own devices, foundering. Those who saw the result as "shallow cynicism" (like A.O. Scott) missed how exciting and powerful it was. (Mike D'Angelo didn't.)

Zombi Child is exciting at times too. But despite its gorgeous imagery and sound, its back and forth dialectic seems more artificial and calculating than Bonello's previous films.

Zombi Child, mins., debuted at Cannes Directors Fortnight May 2019, included in 13 other international festivals, including Toronto and New York. It released theatrically in France Jun. 12, 2020 (AlloCiné press rating 3.7m 75%) and in the US Jan. 24, 2020 (Metascore 75%). Now available in "virtual theater" through Film Movement (Mar. 23-May 1, 2020), which benefits the theater of your choice. https://www.filmmovement.com/zombi-child

[Chris Knipp]

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: WASP NETWORK (2019)


GAEL GARCÍA BERNAL AND PENELOPE CRUZ IN WASP NETWORK

Spies nearby

The is a movie about the Cuban spies sent to Miami to combat anti-Castro Cuban-American groups, and their capture. They are part of what the Cubans called La Red Avispa (The Wasp Network). The screenplay is based on the book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War by Fernando Morais, and it's mainly from the Wasp, Cuban point of view, not the FBI point of view. Unlike the disastrous Seberg, no time is spent looking over the shoulders of G-men, nor will this story give any pleasure to right wing Miami Cubans. But it won't delight leftists much either, or champions of the Cuban Five. The issues of why one might leave Cuba and why one might choose not to are treated only superficially. There's no analysis of US behavior toward Cuba since the revolution.

On the plus side, the film is made in an impeccable, clear style (with one big qualification: see below) and there's an excellent cast with as leads Edgar Ramirez (of the director's riveting miniseries Carlos), Penelope Cruz (Almodóvar's muse), Walter Moura (Escobar in the Netflix series "Narcos"), Ana de Armas (an up-and-comer who's actually Cuban but lives in Hollywood now), and Gael García Bernal (he of course is Mexican, Moura is Brazilian originally, and Ramirez is Venezuelan). They're all terrific, and other cast members shine. Even a baby is so amazing I thought she must be the actress' real baby.

Nothing really makes sense for the first hour. We don't get the whole picture, and we never do, really. We focus on René Gonzalez (Édgar Ramirez), a Puerto Rican-born pilot living in Castro’s Cuba and fed up with it, or the brutal embargo against Castro by the US and resulting shortage of essential goods and services, who suddenly steals a little plane and flies it to Miami, leaving behind his wife Olga and young daughter. Olga is deeply shocked and disappointed to learn her husband is a traitor. He has left without a word to her. Born in Chicago, he was already a US citizen and adapts easily, celebrated as an anti-Castro figure.

We also follow another guy, Juan Pablo Roque (Wagner Moura) who escapes Havana by donning snorkel gear and swimming to Guantanamo, not only a physical challenge but riskier because prison guards almost shoot him dead when he comes out of the water. Roque and Gonzalez are a big contrast. René is modest, content with small earnings, and starts flying for a group that rescues Cuban defectors arriving by water. Juan Pablo immediately woos and marries the beautiful Ana Marguerita Martinez (Ana de Armas) and, as revealed by an $8,000 Rolex, is earning big bucks but won't tell Ana how. This was the first time I'd seen Wagner Moura, an impressively sly actor who as Glenn Kenny says, "can shift from boyish to sinister in the space of a single frame" - and that's not the half of it.

This is interesting enough to keep us occupied but it's not till an hour into the movie, with a flashback to four years earlier focused on Cuban Gerardo Hernandez (Garcia Bernal) that we start to understand something of what is going on. We learn about the CANF and Luis Posada Carriles (Tony Plana), and a young man's single-handed effort to plant enough bombs to undermine the entire Cuban tourist business. This late-arriving exposition for me had a deflating and confounding effect. There were still many good scenes to follow. Unfortunately despite them, and the good acting, there is so much exposition it's hard to get close to any of the individual characters or relationships.

At the moment I'm an enthusiastic follower of the FX series "The Americans." It teaches us that in matters of espionage, it's good to have a firm notion of where the main characters - in that case "Phillip" and "Elizabeth" - place their real, virtually unshakable loyalties, before moving on. Another example of which I'm a longtime fan is the spy novels of John le Carré. You may not be sure who's loyal, but you always know who's working for British Intelligence, even in the latest novel the remarkable le Carré, who at 88, has just produced (Agent Running in the Field - for which he's performed the audio version, and no one does that better). To be too long unclear about these basics in spydom is fatal.

It's said that Assayas had a lot of trouble making Wasp Network, which has scenes shot in Cuba in it. At least the effort doesn't show. We get a glimpse of Clinton (this happened when he was President) and Fidel, who, in a hushed voice, emphatically, asserts his confidence that the Red Avispa was doing the right thing and that the Americans should see that. Whose side do you take?

Wasp Network, 123 mins., debuted at Venice and showed at about ten other international festivals including Toronto, New York, London and Rio. It was released on Netflix Jun. 19, 2019, and that applies to many countries (13 listed on IMDb). Metascore 54%.

[Chris Knipp]

VIGGO FERREIRA-REDIER AND VICKY KRIEPS IN LOVE ME TENDER

ANNA CAZENAVE CAMBET: LOVE ME TENDER (2025)

Stubborn lady

This film dominated by the engrossing (if not exactly enderaring) performance of the always excellent Vicky Krieps is based on the autobiographical docufiction book of the same name by Constance Debré, from which it differs in certain ways. It doesn't make clear how illustrious her family is, though it hints at that. It doesn't make clear how distinguished her legal career was before she renounced it to live as a lesbian and a writer. The film pares down effectively, focusing on the most difficult and devastating aspect of her life, her struggle with her ex-husband for custody of her young son. Also unmentioned here is that she was a mature mother, because she was married for fifteen years before she had a child.

This film is a tough watch. But it becomes engrossing as one watches a painful process unfold. Everyday life has a hard time peeking in from time to time. Advocates of the film argue that its over two-hour length is necessary to convey the experience, which is a long and painful one. Maybe. But then why does it leave one numbed and confused? In his Hollywood Reporter review Jordan Mintzer calls this film "hard-hitting" but says it "overstays its welcome." One might have understood this woman better if one had known more of the details of her unusual life given in the book source and described in 'Alexis Okeowo's 2022 New Yorker article, which considers how LGBTQ people and women considering giving birth might relate to the ideas in Debré's book.

The film is powerful and sad. What happens is that Clémence Delcourt (Krieps) meets with her ex, Laurent Lévêque (Antoine Reinartz) at a Paris cafe and tells him that she is "seeing women." Laurent mumbles and stumbles in response, saying he wants her to be happy. In fact, he immediately takes legal action to completely cut off Clémence's contact with eight-year-old Paul (Viggo Ferreira-Redier). To this end Laurent accuses her of incest and pedophilia, charging her with having homosexual friends who are pedophiles and citing books she has that are obscene. This will dominate the film, with the lesbian love life next best, swimming after that, writing, cycling (she takes Paul for a ride in the country) and last her on-and-off social life. She seems to move from place to place, seemingly longest subletting from a perky young man called Léo (Julien De Saint Jean).

Clémence has to wait for months to see her son again, and when she does, it is with two other women present as observers at a "Center." While Laurent has intimated that Paul has no use for his mother, he was being fed ideas by his father. Investigation shows that he loves his mother and wants to see her. The meetings are unbearably painful and touching and real, though a less experienced actor to play the boy might have worked even better.

Then as time, even years, go by with a long break, for a while Clémence gets to be with Paul not just for an hour but for twenty-four. She can take him on an outing. At his request she takes him to see her father, played by veteran actor Féodor Atkine. Clémence sees her father regularly. We learn that he lives in a guard house on the great estate that he once owned, and that he is dependent on the French morphine substitute Subutex (buprenorphine) which is administered to him by a visiting nurse.

Clémencet tells Paul "we will get through this." But Laurent is working all the time on his son. The hostility so disturbs Paul that he begins refusing to see his mother. She meets with a judge who supports her, but he warns her that his opinion will have no effect. Later we learn Laurent repeatedly fails to conform so that Clémence sees less and less of Paul and they become more and more estranged.

While all this is going on, the film struggles a bit to provide a balanced picture of Clémence's growing life as a writer and as a lesbian. It's only past half way through that she meets a woman journalist, Sarah (Monia Chokri) with whom she becomes serious. Even then, Clémence is cagey and so plainly and brutally tells Sarah that the relationship with her son is more important than she is that it almost ends the relationship, which eventually does end.

In retrospect Clémence's stubborn independence as a shaved-headed, mannishly-dressed, athletic lesbian camping out here and there, living an artistic life as a writer and proclaiming her "dedication" to eschew social gatherings at cafes - while smoking a lot despite the swimming regime - may be seen as rather a luxury, since it is all a matter of self-denial by choice by someone whose family is so rich she would never have been homeless, starving, or penniless. Hence one begins to understand a little bit the disapproval of the ex-husband. But he is seen exclusively as a very weird kind of jerk, and nothing could justify his seeking to cut her off from her own son, or being a homophobe. A secondary theme of the film is how powerfully in conflicts like this the French State works to crush women who are unconventional.

At the end of the film Clémence declares that, having effectively lost custody and contact with her son through her husband's efforts, she has learned to renounce him. She says there is no reason why this kind of tie, mother to son, can't simply end like any other love relationship. And the film leaves us confused, because she also says that Paul may want to reconnect with her: "You know how unpredictable teenagers are" and earlier, the boy has said when he grows up he wants to take her and her grandfather's name - weighted though that name may be. The way the film leaves us confused at the end reflects how difficult it was trying tame the powerful, unruly book source.

Love Me Tender, 134 mins., premiered at Cannes in Un Certain Regard May 20, 2025. Opening Dec. 10, 2025 in France, it received a 3.3=66% critics score on AlloCiné. Screened for this review as part of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center (Mar. 5-15, 2026).
Showtimes:
Sat., Mar. 7 at 12:00pm – Q&A with Anna Cazenave Cambet and dp Kristy Baboul
Thurs., Mar. 12 at 3:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

THÉODORE PELLERIN IN NINO

PAULINE LOQUÈS: NINO (2025)

Drastic realignment

TRAILER

Young Québecois actor Théodore Pellerin won the Critics’ Week Rising Star Award for his "soulful" lead performance as 29-year-old Parisian Nino Clavel in Pauline Loques’ debut feature after it premiered at Cannes 2025 Critics' Week. Linked by Le Monde's film critic, who called this a film "of striking depth and tenderness," to Buster Keaton, Pellerin is tall, deep-voiced, with an open, innocent face. The combined effect is of both strength and vulnerability. The film follows Nino doggedly over a long weekend starting Friday morning and ending Monday morning, beginning when he goes into a hospital and gets dire newss that leaveS him unmoored, swept into a Kafkaesque nihtmare.. The string of days and hours that follow are a meandering odyssey for Nino in which he is realigning to this new reality and ends when he reports back to the hospital to begin radical treatment. Thes events unfold with an economy, almost a casual offhand manner, that marks this as an starkly fresh approach to a familiar subject.

Through overcrowding or confusion at the hospital the young woman doctor who sees him (Victoire Du Bois, identified in the cast list as "The Oncologist") thinks he's already been given the news that he has throat cancer and begins matter-of-factly describing what's next for him. No time, then, to process this information that is, pun intended, very hard to swallow. Clanging noises outside in this scoreless film affirm that a world goes on that for Nino has frozen. THe oncologist is competent, yet almost bored. She shows him some imaging and explains has throat cancer caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) frm a sexually transmitted disease he had a long time ago. .Because of his youth,he will get priority and start treatment on . Assuming hhe wants to have children he needs to produce sperm and deliver it to be banked, and he gets a labeled tube.

Nino's apartment isn't very far away, but he will not get into it. He has lost his keys, apparently not for the first time, and the concierge ("Gardien") is out, and then when he's in, a disaster overwhelms the situation. Nino will sleep on the floor, then go to a flophouse where a well-meaning man in a sad, shabby suit played by Mathieu Amalric will help him shower and clean up.

There are three main people, his mother (played by iconic French actress Jeanne Balibar), a school classmate Zoe (Salome Dewaels) he doesn't remember who has a little boy, Solal (Balthazar Billaud) and his best friend Sofian (William Lebghil), who gives him a surprise birthday party. Yes, this is the weekend of Nino's birthday. He gets close to his mother, huddling close almost like a child. The party shows the withdrawn Nino isn't totally disconnected. His couch-surfing situation draws him to Zoe, and she helps him with the sperm sample. He also enjoys playing dad to Solal.

At first Nino can't see, tp tell anyone, later he does. As Allan Hunter puts it in his Screen Daily review, "Nino carries his cancer diagnosis alone, as if the very act of sharing his news would make it feel all the more real." This also defines the kind of person he is. He hints at a big change to his mother, but she misinterprets him, and thinks it may be he's transitioning. The first time he tells anyone flat out "I have cancer," it's suddenly and impulsively to two strangers who're about to walk out the door and not be seen again. But later Sofian provides warm, intense concern. He really is a best friend.

The lost keys provide a useful external correlative to Nino's total disruption. He has a bureaucratic job that's well handled through conflicting peripheral references. It's quite real, but not quite relevant now. It is a "shit job" in the eyes of a family member, yet it may be socially essential work. Coworkers absurdly sympathize with his vaguely referenced trouble, thinking he's a bit jaded and suggesting he will be okay if he just takes regular breaks from his computer.

Some of these things would be funny at least if the situation were not so grim; or maybe they are funny, anyway. Nino seems protective of his body with his mother, trying also to stop smoking, but on this weekend he does smoke and drink and get quite drunk at the birthday party and he laughs then. He delights at telling a bedtime story for little Solal. The boy probably needs a man in his life and Nino seems to click with him. He and Zoe are unable to make love but she finds a unique use for a baby telephone.

As Hunter points out, French precedents for this theme include Agnes Varda’s Cleo From 5 to 7 (1963), in which a young singer awaits test results, and Francois Ozon’s Time To Leave (2005) in which a young photographer faces terminal cancer. He notes that "Loquès also tips her hat to the cinema of Claude Sautet with her touching use of a photograph of Romy Schneider from his timeless The Things Of Life (1969)," a film in which a man lies by the road dead or dying after a car accident and thinks back over all the "choses de la vie" that are so sweet now.

It's nice that Loquès loves Sautet's warm humanistic cinema but this is a French film of a quieter, drier, later kind. We can appreciate the avoidance of melodrama or bathos but Nino can be frustrating to observe - you may just want to grab him and shake him - and the film is a very slow burn. Despite a lot of very specific details, at times it's almost as if the idea of the film is more powerful than its playing-out. I was reminded from the start of Joaquim Trier's French-inspired Norwegian film 2011 Oslo, Aug. 31 where Anders Danielsen Lie plays a man whose intense brief pathway through the hours is marked not by cancer but a persistent death wish. The structure is similar but the personality is more dynamic. Still, Loquès economical screenplay, co-scripted with Maud Ameline, has a lot going for it, and this isn't a screen experience that it's easy to get out of your head. Unlike Oslo, the end is a beginning and has hopefulness about it as the protagonist is shocked out of his numbness, the threat of death bringing him back to life.

Pellerin is a remarkably versatile actor who is wholly bilingual in French and English and has starred and appeared not only in other French films but also in American films and TV shows including Boy Erased, Lurker, and "On Being a God in Central Florida."

Nino, 96 mins., premiered at Cannes Critics' Week May 18, 2025, also showing at Toronto, Hamburg, Haifa, Warsaw, Rome, Valladolid, Göteborg and other international festivals. It opened in France Sept. 17, 2025. AlloCiné press rating 3.8=76%; spectators 3.9=78%). Screened for this review as part of Film at Lincoln Center's Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (Mar. 5-15, 2026). Showtimes:
Showtimes:
Sat, March 7, d9:30 PM Q&A
Thu, March 12, 1:00 PM


BALTHAZAR BILLAUD, THÉODORE PELLERIN IN NINO

[Chris Knipp]

BASTIEN BOUILLON IN AT WORK

VALERIE DONZELLI: AT WORK/À PIED DE L'OEUVRE (2025)

Oath of poverty of an author doing Uber-style work

THe French review Les Inrockuptibles of Valerie Donzelli's quietly powerful and succinct new film, describes the hero, Paul (Bastien Bouillon) thus: "a rebellious, unconventional artist who chooses fulfillment in poverty and marginality rather than compromise in the limelight." Some French reviewers see the subject of At Work negatively, as a tale of of "uberisation." Surely is not so. Uber is just a thing people do on the way to something else. But Uber reflects a fracturing of work that was simpler before. In the words of the author of the source novel, which is a realistic, experienced-based account, it is "a clever blend of liberty and deprivation." To put it another way, Paul, an established, published writer but not a hugely successful one, allows himself to be exploited for the little things to avoid the big exploitation of a profitable but shameful and dishonest job, like, say, finance or advertising, or even teaching, which is too close to the intellectual activity of writing. Menial work puts the writer in direct touch with life at its most ordinary and keeps him honest.

Paul (Bastien Bouillon, who is brilliant here, and makes the film), is in his early forties, recently divorced with several grown children, whom circumstances lead to be living by himself now; the wife takes the kids to live in Canada. He was a successful photographer, making two or three thousand euros a month. He looks at his cameras, relics now. He will not go back to photography to make money. He has published three novels and is embarking on his fourth.

Though unnoted, the publisher is NRF/Gallimard, publisher of such luminaries as Proust, Sartre, St. Exupéry, Céline and De Beauvoir. Paul is not one of those. His number three did poorly as his editor (Viginie Ledoyen) reminds him. He is making 250 euros a month where before, as a photographer, he made two or three thousand. But Paul wants to write, so he must do other work to live. But not photography, which was another life.

The film is about the work he chooses to do, and about his dedication to the métier of writer. Occasionally we see his editor, and moderately but also essentially we glimpse his wife, played by Donzelli herself. He chooses to work at menial jobs to leave himself time and mind to write and the film focuses much on these jobs. Why not write a bestseller?, his disapproving father (André Marcon) asks. He would not consider it. The jobs are ordinary but sometimes grueling, piecework, miscellaneous gig economy jobs. He takes three hours to cut a lawn because the owner has only clippers. He struggles unloading a metal curved staircase down a stairway out of an apartment for too heavy ahd too cumbersome for one person. He spends ages laboriously removing big boxwood plants (we may pity the plants themselves too) from large planters on a Paris balcony, only to learn that there is another side to the balcony with another eight boxwoods to drag out and bag.

He takes a gold ring to sell, and finds out it's not 18 carat gold. He lets it go anyway, for thirty euros.

Paul is so swamped, and so poor now, he can't afford trips for festive events involving his children who are out of town, and must attend them via Zoom. His hair has been cropped close with clippers: he's like a monk. A friend he dines with says "tu décelaire," you're slowing down, but it sounded to me like "tu désalaire" - you're giving up salary. It's both. Slowly, quietly, invisibly, Paul makes his life workable, earning enough to live on minimally by odd jobs, while continuing to write, and keeping not of all the people and scenes he observes on his jobs.

He is an Uber to and from the airport. One is a lonely lady he goes to bed with on arrival. But they are both out of practice and it's awkward and dodgy. He must give up the loaned space he's moved to and is faced with homelessness, becoming a 'clochard.' His computer gives out and something goes so wrong not only can it not be repaired, but he loses his drive and all his work on it. A lady barkeep has pity on him and leads him to a rest space behind the bar and says he can stay there and write there. He takes to felt pen and pad.

The whole business, the family, the publisher, the odd jobs he does for a pittance to get them from the hot online competition, life day to day, go into the packet of pages he produces and gives to his editor. She directs it to be typed up and bound and when we see that, we know good news has come at last. She finds the book good, it will be his next book.

At the signing, he gets a text about a job, a referral from a previous client. "In two hours?" he texts -- he will go from the book signing to another repair job, because the editor, having paid him an advance some time ago, cannot give him any more when she takes his manuscript. But the buyers of the book are loyal. "I like your writing. I've read all your books." That, at least, is real gold. But better than that,platinum perhaps, is the enormously moving call from his own son, who has read the book (which his children had not done the early ones) and loves it and in whose eyes he has become a mensch.

As an Uber worker Paul points out in the book, he has to be constantly rated, and he is only hirable if he gets five stars. A customer writes he is too untalkative and gives him one star, and his rating drops. Employers no longer fear employees. It's a tough buyer's market out there. What happened to Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité?

In the neat final scene of this neat little film, the client after the book signing thanks Paul for his toilet repair, gives him the 25 euros, and says, "My friend is moving tomorrow morning. Can I recommend you to her?" and Paul says, "Yes. But I don't work mornings. Mornings I write." End of story.

(À pied d'œuvre, the title, means in English " » signifie en anglais « to be ready to start work," "to be on site and ready," in or "to be hard at work" in the context of a team project or construction site.)

At Work/À pied d'oeuvre, 92 mins., premiered in competition at Venice Aug. 29, 2025, showing also at Hamburg, Marrakech and Göteborg, and opened Feb, 4 in France and will open Mar. 5 in Italy. AlloCiné press rating 3.9 (78%). Screened for this review as part of the Mar. 5-15, 2026 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Sun., Mar. 8 at 9:00pm – Q&A with Valérie Donzelli
Fri., Mar. 13 at 4:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

CLAIRE SIMON: WRITING LIFE: ANNIE ERNAUX THROUGH THE EYES OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS (2025)

Literature as female empowerment

From her descriptions Claire Simon appears to have arranged to have the works of the French writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, read by students and then filmed their discussions of them conducted by teachers, mostly in classes, a few in informal settings such as a bus stop. Ernaux has written over two dozen books, mostly autobiographical in nature and frank in subject matter in a style she calls " l’ecriture plate," "flat writing." Her intentionally unadorned descriptions include the discovery of a lost sister, a sexual assault, a miscarriage, and an illegal abortion. (The latter has been made into an award-winning film, Audrey Diwan's Happening/L'Événement (2021) Passages from these are read by girls, also by a few boys. The discussions necessarily take on a feminist perspective.

The classes are in various parts of France as well as Cayenne, in French Guiana, and many of the students are non-white. A few are in the Paris region. It appears to be warm, sunny weather. The locations are given for each section but other explanations are left out. There is no external commentary.

The outspoken frankness of these passages comes through, particularly the miscarriage. The girl laughs as she begins reading it (see photo above), perhaps from embarrassment. Opinions vary, but generally the students overwhelmingly approve the writing - though the BFI reviewer, Laura Venning, wonders "if more disparaging comments were left on the cutting room floor." They find it easier to relate to than the usual "Bac" fare of classics like Balzac or Flaubert, Molière or Racine. On the other hand, if students in French lycées spent all their time on Ernaux or other easily relatable writers they would be shortchanged on their cultural heritage as well as their "Bac" exam preparation.

Or would they? As the demographics change, the ability to connect with that cultural heritage may vary also. But the wise literary student may hue to the traditional because it is what we have, whether she agrees with it or not. This is a conflict cogently discussed by E.D.Hirsch, author of the Cultural Literacy books and advocate of the notion of a core curriculum. If we focus only on the current and the relevant, we lose contact not just with the cultural legacy, Hirsch has shown, but with our store of necessary basic knowledge. Annie Ernaux can only be valuable as a side course when the spotlight is on the classics. But this is not the purpose of the film to consider.

Ernaux's Nobel Prize for Literature comes at a time when women are now receiving the award every few years - 2015, 2018, 2020, 2022, while early in the last century they came much more rarely. The Nobel may help qualify Ernaux as an instant "classic," but this is another topic beyond the scope of the film. It is an interesting dip into cultural history however to read the list of names and the different reasons given over the years for the committee's granting of the prestigious award. Notoriously Stockholm has overlooked some of the world's, and particularly the West's, greatest writers, such as Proust, Joyce, Frost, Orwell, Forster (it was "too late" when they were considered). Ibsen and Twain were deemed "too realistic": what would that committee say about Ernaux? Nabokov was passed up over and over for much more minor and forgettable writers, several of them Swedish and members of the committee itself. Some of the most honored writers in English have been recognized, recently Bob Dylan and Toni Morrison, earlier Faulkner, Hemingway, Naipaul, Pinter, Beckett, Bellow. Despite the scandals, the prestige is there, mattering more for the world now in science.

Ernaux's Nobel recognition reflects these times, and not just the committee's whims. But it feels as if the committee is pussyfooting around when it said it was recognizing Ernaux for "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory." That's not "écriture plate," which would come right out and say what she stands out for is how directly she talks about horrible experiences women have gone through due to the cruelty of men. At least the words about Isaac Bashevis Singer when he got the Nobel mentioned the word "Jewish." But calling a spade a spade is not the Nobel committee's way.

It could be Ernaux was writing her "flat" auto-fiction particularly for high school students, as well as for any woman suffering because of her sex. That makes this film particularly relevant. On the other hand a staged series of discussions doesn't wholly provide the kind of "fly on the wall" picture we seek in a documentary, and fiction films about high school life can be a better picture of it, more fully observed. When there is a young woman or a young man who is particularly bright or articulate here in these scenes recorded by Simon, we wish she had tweaked more to increase their number and, also, to increase the drama.

And what about "writing life" (Écrire la vie)? The students don't read anything they themselves have written. They only read aloud from Ernaux's various texts and comment on them. Nor do they visibly delve into or discuss Ernaux's own personal life as a writer, the risks she took to write the way she did. Simon has done a good job of showing Ernaux's relevance to young people. Now we would still like to know more about Ernaux herself, though her age (she was born September 1, 1940) makes that difficult now.

Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students / Écrire la vie - Annie Ernaux racontée par des lycéennes et des lycéens, 90 mins., comes Apr. 8, 2026 to French theaters. Screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center (Mar. 5-15, 2026). Showtime:
Tuesday, March 10 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Claire Simon

[Chris Knipp]

PAUL KIRCHER, IDIR AZOUGLI IN METEORS

HUBERT CHARUEL, CLAUDE LE PAPE: METEORS (2025)

A deed-end rural coming-of-ager

Debuting at Cannes last May, Meteors focuses on three late-twenties young "losers" in rural France (Mika (Paul Kircher, one of France's brightest young actors), Dan ( César-nominated Idir Azougli) and Tony (Salif Cissé, rather underused), and follows to see who will succeed and who will fail. The actors are excellent; the story is depressing. The setting is what is called in the film the "upper Marne," and explained by Jessica Kiang in her Variety review penned at the film's Cannes Un Certain Regard debut as "the sparsely populated swath of France that extends southwest from the borders of Belgium and Luxembourg to the Pyrenees: the 'diagonale du vide' or 'empty diagonal'."

The idea of a "nowhere land" is a persistent one in France: the idea that nowhere matters but Paris and if you want to be somebody, you have to go there; the idea that provincial France, if you remain there, will pull you down and keep you from really succeeding. To be a Frenchman, you must be a Parisian. The backlash against this also exists: the resentment toward Paris as a pseudo-important city and Parisians as snobs and pretenders. Meteors seems to perpetuate this picture with its story of three young men two of whom basically fail. An AlloCiné viewer's comment says Meteors "mixes genres, buddy comedy, social drama, thriller, and melodrama, and creates a seemingly personal film about male friendship and dependence," but it almost seems to me most of all a horror film.

Tony, who is Black, is the industrious one. He has organized a kind of sub-business of local employees who work in his waste disposal business. At first we see all three together at a bowling alley partying just as they did as teens. Later on the film focuses mostly on the unhealthily codependent buddy relationship of the kooky, doomed Dan, who has pointless dreams and dangerous schemes, such as moving to Madagascar to look after street dogs, and the dull but well-meaning Mika, who works in a Burger King. Dan's harebrained idea of stealing a neighbor's Maine Coon cat with Mika as the getaway driver results in their both getting on six months probation, and the escape of the cat.

Mika and Dan see a female social services officer who examines their case. To fare well with the judge in six months, and for Mika to regain his driver's license, she tells them they must have proper housing (they are couch surfing) and both must have proper jobs (including Dan). Since Tony has begun a big job at the local nuclear waste plant, Dan slides in with him and at first Mika too. When Dan has an epileptic fit on the job, the resulting medical exam reveals that he already has serious liver damage from his continual drinking, but when he learns this he just goes on drinking. Mika stops drinking and smoking. Later, Dan disappears at the waste plant. No one can find him. This is deemed not unusual.

At the film's end Mika receives a letter from Dan, which may or may not be real and offer a ray of hope. Overall the feeling is of the disintegration of youth directly into a state of no-exit maturity. The convincing image of the film is of Mika and Dan's toxic, tragic relationship. Kircher and Azougli turn in superb performances, but they cannot save the dead-end plot.

This is the Saint-Dizier-born Charuel's second feature based in his home region, the first, quite different in import, having been the 2017 Bloody Milk/Petit paysan, about a desperate small dairy farmer who finds one of his cows sick and tries to hide it because of the danger of having to kill the whole herd and being ruined. This succeeded because of a solider theme and also the lead played by the fine Swann Arlaud, whose specialness shows up in better and better roles, including a key witness in Ozon's By the Grace of God (2019) and the lawyer in Triet's Anatomy of a Fall (2023). Charuel and his writing partner were trapped in pure drear with the oddly named Meteors. This film is another sincere and dedicated depiction of the region, but the action has too little spark and the characters wind up seeming one-note despite the excellent actors portraying them.

Meteors/Météors, Debuted May 2025 at Un Certain Regard in the Cannes Festival. Ir opened Oct. 8, 2025 in France, receiving an AlloCiné press rating of 3.6=72% (spectators ditto). It was screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center (Mar. 5-15, 2026). Showtimes:
Monday, March 9 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Salif Cissé
Wednesday, March 11 at 3:30pm

[Chris Knipp]

VALÉRIE DONZELLI: AT WORK/À PIED DE L'OEUVRE (2025)

Oath of poverty of an author doing gig economy work

THe French review Les Inrockuptibles of Valerie Donzelli's quietly powerful and succinct new film, describes the hero, Paul (Bastien Bouillon) thus: "a rebellious, unconventional artist who chooses fulfillment in poverty and marginality rather than compromise in the limelight." Some French reviewers see the subject of At Work negatively, as a tale of of "uberisation." Surely is not so. Uber is just a thing people do on the way to something else. But Uber reflects a fracturing of work that was simpler before. In the words of the author of the source novel, which is a realistic, experience-based account, it is "a clever blend of liberty and deprivation." To put it another way, Paul, an established, published writer but not a hugely successful one, allows himself to be exploited for the little things to avoid the big exploitation of a profitable but shameful and dishonest job, like, say, finance or advertising, or even teaching, which is too close to the intellectual activity of writing. Menial work puts the writer in direct touch with life at its most ordinary and keeps him honest.

Paul (Bastien Bouillon, who is brilliant here, and makes the film), is in his early forties, recently divorced with several grown children, whom circumstances lead to be living by himself now; the wife takes the kids to live in Canada. He was a successful photographer, making two or three thousand euros a month. He looks at his cameras, relics now. He will not go back to photography to make money. He has published three novels and is embarking on his fourth.

Though unnoted, the publisher is NRF/Gallimard, publisher of such luminaries as Proust, Sartre, St. Exupéry, Céline and De Beauvoir. Paul is not one of those. His number three did poorly as his editor (Viginie Ledoyen) reminds him. He is making 250 euros a month where before, as a photographer, he made two or three thousand. But Paul wants to write, so he must do other work to live. But not photography, which was another life.

The film is about the work he chooses to do, and about his dedication to the métier of writer. Occasionally we see his editor, and more rarely but also essentially we glimpse his wife, played by Donzelli herself. He chooses to work at menial jobs to leave himself time and mind to write and the film focuses much on these jobs. Why not write a bestseller?, his disapproving father (André Marcon) asks. He would not consider it. The jobs are ordinary but sometimes grueling, piecework, miscellaneous gig economy jobs. He takes three hours to cut a lawn because the owner has only clippers. He struggles unloading a metal curved staircase down a stairway out of an apartment for too heavy ahd too cumbersome for one person. He spends ages laboriously removing big boxwood plants (we may pity the plants themselves too) from large planters on a Paris balcony, only to learn that there is another side to the balcony with another eight boxwoods to drag out and bag.

He takes a gold ring to sell, and finds out it's not good real gold. He lets it go anyway, for thirty euros.

Paul is so swamped, and so poor now, he can't afford trips for festive events involving his children who are out of town, and must attend them via Zoom. His hair has been cropped close with clippers: he's like a monk. A friend he dines with says "tu décelaire," you're slowing down, but it sounded to me like "tu désalaire" - you're giving up salary. It's both. Slowly, quietly, invisibly, Paul makes his life workable, earning enough to live on minimally by odd jobs, while continuing to write, and keeping not of all the people and scenes he observes on his jobs.

He is an Uber to and from the airport. One is a lonely lady he goes to bed with on arrival. But they are both out of practice and it's awkward and dodgy. He must give up the loaned space he's moved to and is faced with homelessness, becoming a 'clochard.' His computer gives out and something goes so wrong not only can it not be repaired, but he loses his drive and all his work on it. A lady barkeep has pity on him and leads him to a rest space behind the bar and says he can stay there and write there. He takes to felt pen and pad.

The whole business, the family, the publisher, the odd jobs he does for a pittance to get them from the hot online competition, life day to day, go into the packet of pages he produces and gives to his editor. She directs it to be typed up and bound and when we see that, we know good news has come at last. She finds the book good, it will be his next book.

At the signing, he gets a text about a job, a referral from a previous client. "In two hours?" he texts -- he will go from the book signing to another repair job, because the editor, having paid him an advance some time ago, cannot give him any more when she takes his manuscript. But the buyers of the book are loyal. "I like your writing. I've read all your books." That, at least, is real gold. But better than that,platinum perhaps, is the enormously moving call from his own son, who has read the book (which his children had not done the early ones) and loves it and in whose eyes he has become a mensch.

As an Uber worker Paul points out in the book, he has to be constantly rated, and he is only hirable if he gets five stars. A customer writes he is too untalkative and gives him one star, and his rating drops. Employers no longer fear employees. It's a tough world out there. What happened to Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité?

In the neat final scene of this neat little film, the client after the book signing thanks Paul for his toilet repair, gives him the 25 euros, and says, "My friend is moving tomorrow morning. Can I recommend you to her?" and Paul says, "Yes. But I don't work mornings. Mornings I write." End of story.

At Work/À pied d'oeuvre, 92 mins., premiered in competition at Venice Aug. 29, 2025, showing also at Hamburg, Marrakech and Göteborg, and opened Feb, 4 in France and will open Mar. 5 in Italy. AlloCiné press rating 3.9 (78%). Screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center Mar. 5-15, 2026.
Sunday, March 8 at 9:00pm – Q&A with Valérie Donzelli
Friday, March 13 at 4:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

AUSTIN BUTLER IN THE BIKERIDERS

C H R I S__K N I P P'S__2 0 2 4__M O V I E__B E S T__L I S T S

FEATURE FILMS
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
Anora (Sean Baker)
Beast, The (Bertrand Bonello)
Bikeriders, THe (Jeff Nichols)
Blitz (Steve McQueen)
Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice)
Conclave (Edward Berger)
Goldman Case, The/Le Procès Goldman (Cédric Kahn)
Real Pain, A (Jesse Eisenberg)
Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)

RUNNERS UP
The Damned (Roberto Minvervini)

BEST DOCUMENTARIES
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressberger (David Hinton)
Merchant Ivory (Stephen Soucy)
New Kind of Wilderness, A (Silje Evensmo Jacobsen)
No Other Land (Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham)
Sugarcane (Emily Kassie, Julian Brave NoiseCat)

UNRELEASED FAVORITES
Afternoons of Solitude/Tardes de soledad (Albert Serra)
Caught by the Tides/ 风流一代 (Jia Zhang-ke)

NOT SEEN YET
Babygirl (Halina Reijn) Dec. 25 release
Complete Unknown, A (James Mangold) Dec. 25 release
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie) (also unreleased)
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross) Dec. 13 release

LESS ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT THAN SOME
Brutalist, The (Brady Corbet)
Civil War (Alex Garland)
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
La Chimera La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)
Queer (Luca Guadagnino 2024)
Room Next Door, The (Almodóvar)
Substance, The (Coralie Fargeat)
____________________________

COMMENTS (Dec. 1, 2024)

Just a first draft; a work in progress. But I can guarantee that "Best Features" is a list only of new movies I have watched this year with a lot of pleasure and admiration and think you would enjoy. I'll be working on it. I tend to forget things, and there are late arrivals. I also may make it numerical but for now it's alphabetical. I'm expecting a lot of Babygirl, and as always there are buzz-worthy 2024 films I have not yet seen, notably Nickel Boys. I stive to focus on movies available to everyone to watch, but that's less a problem now that there are so many eventual releases on platforms. As for the "Less Enthusiastic" list, I recommend that you watch them too, because people are talking about them - a lot, especially The Brutalist, The Substance, and Emilia Pérez.
And then there's Megalopolis. Whether or not they are as great, or for that matter as awful, as some people are claiming, they will be talked about during awards season.

Enjoy - and try to get out to see all you can in a movie theter!

[Chris Knipp]

CHRIS HEMSWORTH IN CRIME 101

BART LAYTON: CRIME 101 (2026)

C+ over B-

This is a movie about a chain of lone-wolf jewel thefts in Los Angeles and the people who are in different ways involved in them. "101" has a dual meaning: the thefts are so skillful they are a course in how to do it; they're also linked by all occurring near California's Highway 101. This is a big, loud, exciting, almost contiually tense and somewhat violent movie, though the thefts are achieved, notably, without violence. It has an exciting finale. It's got a good cast. But it's not a great movie. This is for several reasons. It does not tell its story clearly. For being about a meticulous thief, it comes off as surprisingly chaotic. There are actually some plot points that get dropped. And that way much of the pleasure gets lost.

The London-born filmmaker Bart Layton is known for directing and producing true-crime hybrid documentaries such as The Imposter (2012) and American Animals (2018), also for a 2007 TV series "Locked-Up Abroad," about people who got caught up in crimes and arrests and did time in rough foreign jails. There is something of the latter in Crime 101, because several "straight" folks get caught up in crime.

Crime 101 has the marks of an early-in-the year release: there's fun here, but things aren't all quite right. It's got name actors in it. Chris Hemsworth plays a suave jewel thief; but as one critic mentions, if you want to see a good movie about jewel thievery, why not just watch the classic Rififi, from 1955? Mark Ruffalo is here as a rumpled cop whose unified theory of the jewel thefts his bosses don't buy (they'd like to rack up more arrests). Ruffalo has played many cops, including one in Zodiac and, more to the point, one in Mann’s Collateral who has a theory his colleagues don't buy. There's also Halle Berry, Jennifer Jason Leigh (underused), Barry Keoghan (too crudely used), Nick NOlte (too briefly used), Monica Barbero who convincingly impersonated Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown. Her role as the thief's girlfriend corresponds to Amy Brenneman's in Heat.

The four main cast members have all been in superhero movies and it's been suggested they are trying to atone for their sins here, because this is, relatively speaking, a "human" film. There could be more depth in character portrayal for sure, but these are people we're watching, perhaps except for the outsider criminal who comes in after the master thief has done the heist, and noisily and violently steals it from him. This character, played by Barry Keoghan, is the weak point of the action. His character isn't interesting enough or violent enough. He is not explored.

One thing that is interesting is - even though it's not handled elegantly - the way different stories are followed and, sometimes, interwoven. Sharon is a fancy insurance sales person and claims adjuster played by Halle Berry whose inability to move up the employment ladder to the level of parnter as she should due to her superior's ageist and sexist (and perhaps racist?) bias is carefully explored. She also runs into one of the bad guys and they start dating. There is the cop (Ruffalo) who's treated as a dummy and even a liability for his partner though he has the solution to the crime. All this and more would be extremely interesting in a better written and better edited film.

There is a lot of dialogue that Layton, working with Don Winslow from a novella by Winslow, have added on and one has the feeling they're going for some of the inspired use of profanity Tarantino is so good at but, of course, they're not Tarantino and the talk isn't particularly arresting. Greater brevity could have meant greater wit.

But the worst thing that is wrong with Crime 101 is that it has been found by numerous critics to be almost dumbfoundingly indebted to Michael Mann's Heat.. And if that were not enough, a lot of its visuals, especially the night aerial shots of the city, are lifted from Mann's Collateral, where, however, they are sharper and more beautiful.

Some may like the up-to-date hyperintensity of the filmmaking here. Everything is shaky-cam and super up-close. This produces excitement. So does the loud and propulsive score by multiple hands but primarily by Blanck Mass, the electronic solo project of British composer and producer Benjamin John Power, which is effective, if overbearing. But what is achieved in excitement is lost at times in the ability to observe clearly what is going on. Crime films are a matter of detail, and the audience needs to be able to appreciate the specifics and above all, the timing and the control of nerves under pressure. As has often been pointed out the dazzling jewel theft sequence in Rififi, the most memorable in the history of movies, runs for half an hour with not a word spoken and not a note of music.

Motivational talks and yoga and a phone that shows a character she has not gotten a good nights sleep are running themes in this film. Perhaps as Ben Kenigsberg says in his NY Times review, this means Crime 101 is "less a guide to criminality than a manual for self-help." But if so what good would that be?

Crime 101, 120 mins., dropped in over 50 countries Feb. 12, 2026. Metacritic rating: 68%.

[Chris Knipp]

JOANNA HOGG: THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (2022)


TILDA SWINTON IN THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER

A trip north

The Eternal Daughter may be categorized as a film of horror or the supernatural, but devotees of either will doubtless be disappointed. Numerous critics describe it as "a distinctly minor work" by the director, whose 2019 The Souvenir brought her to wide attention, and to mine. It's worth going back and watching all her three earlier features, Unrelated, Archipelago and Exhibition: they're not fun watches, but the unfun-ness is distinctly her own, uppermiddleclass British constraints and torments that will seem to grow out of, not lead into, the autobiographical film student with the unfortunate posh boyfriend of The Souvenir. The underimpressed critics also say The Eternal Daughter, which serves as a sequel to The Souvenir II, the end of a trilogy, that it is "slooow."

Well, The Eternal Daughter is unique, and while I'd agree it has its longeurs, and is almost Beckettian in its uneventfulness. It's also subtle and beautiful, and the performance at the center of it by Tilda Swinton as both Julie Hart, a filmmaker, and Rosalind Hart, her mother, whom the hyper-attentive Julie takes to a big old, apparently empty hotel for her birthday, is remarkable. The double performance is not just a stunt. It's also a brilliant idea central to the film's themes and ideas, which magnify and unfold over time like the old Japanese paper flowers that grew when you dipped them in water. And all this isn't just cleverness. It serves to deliver hard emotional honesty that characterizes Hogg's best moments in the other films. After the slow passages, as I watched, the emotion grew, and at the end I was devastated with a still unfolding sense of sorrow too deep for tears.

Hogg makes much use of the horror vibe and genre ticks throughout - a pale face in a window; knocks in the night; Rosalind's setter Louis (the canine companion an important character in many a family), brought along, disappearing and then popping up back in the room; the odd, unfriendly "staff;" the confounding corridors and rooms; the fog outside - and all these events and things allow for the general feeling we have that something strange is going on. Many will doubtless guess the film's secret early on. That's unimportant. It's all in the very distinctive nuance of the film and the interchanges between Julie and Rosalind. It's very important that until the end, a two-shot doesn't occur. You see Julie saying something, then you see - or will you see? You never know - Rosalind. And yes, you're very aware that both are Tilda Swinton in two different sorts of drag. The Rosalind drag includes peculiarly subtle aging makeup. She's not made to look very old. (A very old woman is seen toward the end, in a kind of coda and subtly spooky jolt.) You're marveling at the costumer's and makeup artist's art and the acting, but you're very aware that you're watching Tilda Swinton.

And all this is kind of creepy, if not what you'd call "horrible." Or maybe it is; maybe you can anticipate a Hitchcockian shock coming. It's not like that. It's more like the air goes out of the tire. (Or tyre.) The more overt horror-supernatural vibe comes from the great aristocratic house in Wales that Julie and Rosalind are staying at. It is a place, then in private hands, where Rosalind, as a young girl, was sent with other family members to escape the bombing during the War. But Julie doesn't know much about this. She has devoted much of her life to caring about and loving her mother - she has a husband, but no children - but her mother remains largely a mystery to her. Other later visits to the house turn out to have occurred later, and things happened, not happy memories, that Julie didn't know about. The place is beautiful, in a mournful way. The accoutrements of the rooms, even the keys at the front desk, are handsome. the ornate, formal landscaping outside, shrouded often in cinematic fog, is beautiful in its layers of green. The exterior shots look like subtle color lithographs.

The place isn't particularly friendly. Julie and Rosalind are greeted by a grumpy receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies), who also reappears as the waitress at the dining room (and there are only four dishes on the menu). Is Harold Pinter an influence? This is in some ways like a magnificently visually expanded play, a chamber drama, a drama in the head. A warmer character is a groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell) who talks to Julie a few times and comforts and shares an understanding of loss. He says his wife died a year ago.

Julie is here to celebrate Rosalind's birthday - or is she? The birthday celebration turns out to be grotesque and sad, family happiness gone wrong, though a a bottle of champagne is uncorked and poured from and a birthday cake is brought in. Julie chooses to bring it in herself. But whenever Julie and Rosalind are seated talking together at meals, Julie surreptitiously sets her smartphone out to record the conversation. Early on she's said she's here to work, on a new film presumably, and she goes to a special place to do so, but she can't sleep, she's uncomfortable, and she goes day after day without getting any work done. The other use of the smartphone is to try to talk to her husband. This she has to do out in front of the hotel pacing about near a hedge trying to get reception, which isn't good. And the wi-fi is patchy in the building as well.

These descriptions sound ordinary enough. But in Joanna Hogg's skilled hands and the meticulous, complicated interchanges of Tilda and Tilda, they resonate with meanings you go on pondering long after the film is over. The heart of the matter is the confrontation of lives and family relationships, the permanent, difficult, mysterious, inescapable ones. The daughter is "eternal" because filial relationships never end. Imagine making a movie about your mother and its turning out to be a sort of horror film. Others would make a story that's joyous and celebratory. But where is the truth? I remember the priest who Malraux talks about in his Anti-Memoirs who, questioned on what he had learned about people from thirty years of hearing confession, gave two ideas; there is no such thing as a grownup person; and people are much less happy than they appear. But the scenes we have watched have been an expiation. And the end Julie has come thorough and is typing away on her laptop: the new film has come to her. This one.

If any of this sounds intriguing, you are urged to see The Eternal Daughter. It's a marvelous film, a study of grief, memory and family relationships that cuts to the bone. A minor work? Remember the little Fragonard painting in the Wallace Collection in The Souvenir. That whole film grows out of it.

The Eternal Daughter, 96 mins., debuted Sept. 6, 2022 at Venice, showing at nine or more other international festivals, including Toronto, Zurich, London, New York (Main Slate), Vienna, Seville, AFI, Thessaloniki and Marrakech. Limited US theatrical release and on itnernet Dec. 2, 2022. Metacritic rating: 79%.