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]

ROBERT ARAMAYO, PETER MULLAN IN I SWEAR

KIRK JONES: I SWEAR (2026)

Life of a well-known crusader for understanding of Tourette syndrome

TRAILER

We heard first about I Swear because of an incident at the BAFTAs in February when John Davidson, whose life story and struggles with Tourette's inspired the film, shouted a racial slur as Sinners stars Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented the first prize at the awards. Word got through that he meant no harm but has Tourette syndrome. Unfortunately, Americans had not yet seen I Swear, which is a telling of his story (a thoroughly engaging one). I Swear is a detailed picture of a life with severe Tourette's, which involves not just involuntary tics, jerks and moves of the neck and head and eyes, but involuntary vocal outbursts, which can be as often as not shouted provocatiohs or obscenities. John turned his life around by becoming a crusader for understanding of the issue.

I Swear recounts the life of this famous Brit with Tourette syndrome (or Tourette's), which is a curse, though he, John Davidson, insists, for reasons of his own, that it's not a "disability." I Swear begins with a brief preview: a middle-aged Brit balking at going up to receive an award from the Queen for his activism. He has a problem that makes public appearances difficult and embarrassing. He balks at going in for the awards ceremony because he may embarrass himself. A woman friend, however, pleads with him and eventually persuades him to go in.

Yes, this is a biopic, but those who say it's "just another disability movie" are ignoring how the lead Robert Aramayo delivers a performance that has been called "mind-blowing" and "fearless" and is also - an award-grabbing aspect - technically demanding. Aramayo has already won two awards at the BAFTAs, Best Actor in a Leading Role and the EE Rising Star Award at the 2026 BAFTAs, the first time the same actor has won both awards in the same year.

But the movie proper begins with a plunge into the lilt of Scottish voices and the clear air and simplicity of Galashiels in the southeastern borders of Scotland in 1983, the time of Davidson's youth, with fresh-faced Scott Ellis Watson as teenage Davidson, a promising football (soccer) goalie who's prepared by his stern mother (Shirley Henderson) to doh the school jacket and tie and attend Galashiels Academy. His goalie skills are admired, but it is now that young John's undiagnosed Tourette syndrome begins to emerge. It is noticed but is far from understood. His involuntary tics in the form of physical jerks and vocal outbursts, which increase in times of stress, begin to ruin John's performance on the soccer pitch. In other settings they lead to bullying and mockery of the well-meaning, innocent boy and old-fashioned corporal punishment of severe whipping on the hand by Headmaster Donald Watkins (Ron Donachie) for insulting shouted words the stern, old fashioned administrator thinks intentional.

We are engaged by the colorful lilt of the Scottish accents and the 1980's period feel - a different world from ours. The innocence, the limitation of this world will set off John's growing oddity of behavior as he is increasingly dominated by tics of the neck and eyes and bursts of voice that he cannot control. He is as if possessed, and nobody in this part of the world yet knows this is a neurological condition. I Swear goes on to tell the story of an exceptional individual who went on to become a leading activist and campaigner for Tourette syndrome. The film is also the public's introduction to the condition and, as such, has an educational function.

The strong supporting cast includes the excellent Peter Mullan as Tommy Trotter, a kind, understanding man who becomes a surrogate father for John as a young man by giving him a job as a janitor and disregarding his tics. The number two role of the film however belongs to Maxine Peake as Dottie Aschenbach, the mother of his school friend Murray (Francesco Piacentini-Smith), an experienced mental health nurse who invites John into their home, providing sanctuary and becoming a surrogate mother. (His real mother could not cope; his father, played by Steven Cree, abandoned the family.

In an interview director John Kirk explains his choice of subject by saying "the collision of humour, emotion, and tragedy was appealing," and when people say this is a "conventional disability flick," ignore them. Its mixture of elements, starting with comedy and tragedy, give it layers. I Swear is a film that arouses curiosity, later tears and laughter, because Tourette's is weird and funny, but also a tragic interruption of life. It helps later in the film to see John meet a young women with Tourette's, the way they shout and sound off to each other madly, then settle into the comfort of normal conversation. It's also salutary to see a whole group of young people with Tourette's. Though Coprolalia, the outbursts of rude and inappropriate language, isn't always present, the uncontrolled outbursts are.

Davidson is initially told the condition is incurable. On the other hand he finds one can learn to anticipate outbursts and to some extent control them. Later on we see him try an experimental method that eliminates the behavior, if only briefly. With it, for a few blissful minutes, John walks through the rooms of a library, which have always been barred to him as "too quiet."

I Swear is an unusual film, a sympathetic portrait of disability manifested in one of its leading crusaders emerging in his early years and a powerful lesson in empathy. Many years ago there was a QED series BBC documentary about the real-life young John Davidson, "John's Not Mad" (1989), considered a classic, followed up by "The Boy Can't Help It" (2002) and "Tourettes: I Swear I Can't Help It" (2009).

I Swear, 120 mins., premiered at Toronto Sept.7, 2025 and was included in numerous other international festivals and released in multiple countries. The US theatrical release by Sony Pictures Classics is on Apr. 24, 2026. Metacritic rating: 73%.

[Chris Knipp]

ALLISON BENCH IN BUFFET INFINITY

SIMON GLASSMAN: BUFFET INFINITY (2025)

Late-nite TV ad-clip madness creates a woozy plotline

Buffet Infinity is a new Canadian horror-satirical film that builds its entire content out of a 100-minute interweaving of short clips of (mostly) fictional found-footage style old videotapeed TV ads that, when so woven together, gradually begin to compose a creepy-comical sort of buffoonish David Lynch interconnected story of a disintegrating neighborhood - sort of. Unfortunately, characters and storylines, while oddball and droll as far as they go, don't develop quite far enough, and the film, for all its charm and originality, winds up consisting ultimately of suggestive hints rather than a full-scaled, Lynchian achieved reality. You can't help thinking, "Somebody could really do something with this idea!" (With these ideas, plural, actually.). But here, you're still seeing raw material, not quite finished product.

If you want more detail of the content of Buffet Infinity, - but really you have to see the film to appreciate what's going obn - Jeff Nelson's movie review written at the 2025 Fantasia Film Festival provides a good summary:

Low-budget local commercials and news reports are threaded together to tell the alarming tale of two restaurants wrestling for a foothold in the town of Westridge County. Sandwich shop owner Jenny (Allison Bench) and the mega Buffet Infinity trade public jabs in a hilarious exchange, especially when the former’s “secret sauce” gets verbally dragged through the mud.

Ads for the local law firm, pawn shop, mattress store, and insurance company fill in the space. They riff on late-night television ad tropes with similarly sharp humor, but take a progressively unhinged turn in response to strange happenings around Westridge County. A sinkhole and a droning hum drive the population to madness and even disrupt birds’ flight patterns. Sinister messages flash on television screens mid-advertisement, hinting at a greater evil, as local restaurant workers suddenly go missing. He explains:
"Recorded on a VHS tape, the dated ads are full of distortion, grain, and recording issues. The format falls apart toward the end, leaning further into a found footage aesthetic that feels like a segment pulled from the V/H/S franchise." (V/H/S is an American horror anthology franchise that includes eight found footage films, two spin-off films, and one miniseries.)

While this is more raw material than a finished film, especially given the feature length, it's good raw material that will stimulate your brain and imagination and should be watched by any aspiring found-footage filmmakers searching for ideas. It is a stimulating watch.

Buffet Infinity, 100 mins., premiered at Montreal (Fantasia) Jul. 28, 2025, and has also been shown at Brooklyn Horror Oct. 2025 and New Orleans (Overlook) Apr. 2026. Opening in select cinemas on Apr. 24 and on VOD May 8, 2026.

[Chris Knipp]

YAEL BRIDGE: WHO MOVES AMERICA (2026)

UPS Teamsters build solidarity among 340,000 workers as a strike deadline approaches. The film follows a new California driver, a 1997 strike veteran in New York, and a part-time Kentucky warehouse worker as they organize and picket. Based in San Marcos, California, Justin Alo is featured as a full-time driver who takes a proactive role in organizing and securing a new contract for the Teamsters union, representing a younger generation of workers recognizing the value of their union benefits.

Stars
Justin Alo, Antoine Andrews, Angel Badu,
Reviews
1 Critic review, Overly Honest Reviews (Chris Jones) at True/False Festival, Columbia, Missouri, Mar. 5-8, 2026.

[Chris Knipp]

MOLLY BELLE WRIGHT, WYATT SOLIS, JOHN MAGARO IN OMAHA

COLE WEBLEY: OMAHA (2025)

American poverty and the pain of the unexpressed

In the opening of the subtly painful and beautifully filmed and acted 2025 debut film Omaha, the house of a dad (John Magaro, of First Cow and Past Lives, in his most emotionally powerful role to date) is being foreclosed on, forcing him and his children to vacate immediately, early one morning, on a road trip. The dad, reeling from financial ruin and the death of his wife, must hurriedly force his children to pack up and leave amid intense emotional distress. He tells his young daughter to imagine the house is on fire, and grab only what she would grab in that case. A sheriff stands outside. The following road trip is a kind of slow burn mystery.

The daughter is nine-year-old Ella (an excellent Molly Belle Wright), the son six-year-old Charlie (Wyatt Solis, also fine), and both come to vivid life in what will be a confusing road trip a little like no other, from poverty toward desperation. At departure, Charlie is stuffed in back and Ella runs along the broken-down hatchback's passenger side pushing, while Dad pushes on the driver's side to jump-start it, obviously a routine they've gone through before. In back Charlie hugs their Golden Retriever, Rex. For Charlie, this is an adventure; Ella knows it's trouble.

Though this film has been accused of being miserabilism and perhaps poverty porn, its misery and its poverty are masked by John Magaro's tight-lipped protagonist, who never says what is wrong or where they are going. This film is almost dangerously withholding; but you can watch it as a mystery story, one that stays close to the children's point of view. Part of that mystery, actually is solved right away for us. It's 2008, the father is in construction, out of work, and his food stamps are running out, as is his ability to cope. But he doesn't tell any of this to the kids, though it is on his face and Ella can read it and sometimes plays back his desperation to him on her own face.

A woman at the end tells this father "they seem like good kids." They do. Ella can be a child, and dance and play; but she's had grownup responsibility and awareness forced upon her and that shows in the way she looks at her dad sometimes. Charlie questions what is happening, and he can be frightened and horrified, but mostly he's a tousled haired boy ready to play. And they do both get to play, gamboling joyfully through a zoo, and swimming in a motel pool. But their father is imploding and the three of them are on a terrible cross country highway trip, through Salt Lake, to Omaha, a destination whose nature is kept secret for a reason.

This more stand-alone role for Magaro, often wordless, is nonetheless layered and rich, proof that he ranks among the best film actors of his generation. Magaro and Wright here have been compared to Mescal and Corio in Aftersun.. This is a painful movie to watch, with the peculiar, gnawing pain of a father whose poverty inhibits his relationship with his children, his inability to provide rapidly gnawing away at his parenthood. Every moment by the roadside costs him money and is a gift and a deprivation. He doesn't eat: he feeds the kids. He plays sometimes by their rules: he does what he can to please them, to let them live as children. (Charlie steals toy cars at the gas stations: his father never mentions it.) Dad uses a swear word, and Charlie says as punishment he has to give them ice cream: he quietly announces that at the next stop they will get it. In Omaha Ella has learned at a rest stop there is a good zoo. Dad takes them there, pays thirty dollars for their admissions, when at the grocery store he had barely twenty dollars worth of food stamps, a good time being more important now than nourishment.

Writing in the Guardian at Sundance, Adrien Gordon called Omaha "withholding to the point of numbness," and the dad's tightlippedness is indeed painful. But Horton goes on to list compensations: "the hypnotic quality of Webley’s visual style," the "fleeting gorgeous moments" of sunrise and sunset "at speed," the "quiet bits of unity and looseness amid crisis." These he thinks (and I agree), "linger after the film's somewhat flat finale." Omaha in fact packs a powerful emotional wallop, both along the road trip and in that finale, which is still devastating, however "flat" in its delivery. Omaha is a very promising debut, beautifully filmed and edited and acted. Cole Webley is a new filmmaker to watch.

Omaha, 83 mins., premiered Jan. 2025 at Sundance, showing also at Miami, Dallas, Nantucket, Munich, Maine, Melbourne, Busan, Stockholm, São Paulo, and many other US and international festivals. Opening in the US Apr. 24, 2026, in France Apr. 29. Metacritic rating: 76%.

[Chris Knipp]

AARON DAVIDMAN: AMERICAN SOLITAIRE (2025)

A meditation on the American obsession with guns

This film opens with a vignette of a man assembling a rifle as a boy watches quietly, with awe. It's a hushed ritual, well and memorably shot to be straightforward, yet luminous. A lot of other scenes of American Solitaire also have the feel of rituals. Rather than tell a story, this film tosses out a series of heavy subjects for us to contemplate, and massages them. It doesn't at all times quite work as a movie. But it impresses with its seriousness. It brings up subjects like PTSD and the struggle to deal with it, gun proliferation and gun violence, the cult of weaponry, and, of course, war. In an environment like this film's presentation at New York's Cinema Village, with nights for discussion with the filmmakers and the cast, or for gun violence prevention and safety, and for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, where the emphasis is coming together and discussing issues raised, this can be a valuable film because it brings up many of these subjects in an atmosphere that's thoughtful, not sensational.

The focus of American Solitaire is a wounded American Afghan war veteran, Slinger (Joshua Close), who returns to his hometown. Then, stuff happens. He's arranged to stay at the house of another veteran, Athena (Joanne Kelly), who was CST, Kandahar, "but it was the Rangers." Slinger was Special Forces. When he was wounded, Emmett (Jamir Vega) hears, he "died," and they brought him back. He saw stuff.

Emmett is the fourteen-year-old nephew of Slinger's buddy August, or Auggie (Gilbert Owuor), who is black. Slinger is white. His father Dominic, played by actor Cooper Huckabee, has been described as a "crusty old fella" said to represent "rugged individualism" and traditional masculinity that conflicts with Slinger's journey toward healing. I'd say he's a redneck bigot asshole, and a thoroughly hateful old man, part of the problem. He's also a chain smoker with diabetes who says all the wrong things to Slinger.

While Slinger is done with his service, when Auggie asks him if he'd go back, he answers, ambivalently, "No, but yes." But Slinger really is done. He has a huge wound on his leg, and walks with a cane, though not always. He can't go back. And a physical accident when he's trying to play ball with a kid shows how close to collapse he is. An excellent performance by Joshua Close manages to be intense without ever seeming showy. He projects a troubled yet controlled inwardness.

The topic of psychotherapy for the mental wounds of war arises. Slinger is changing through the brief trajectory of the film, initially against "shrinks," who he's told are called "therapists" now, then maybe not. Auggie is dead set against them, outraged at the idea. He has been commissioned as an officer and is now a major. An officer doesn't do therapy, he says - certainly not a black one. Slinger and Auggie go to a shooting range. Auggie shakes so much he can't hit the target. They are both angered by a couple of young men who behave irresponsibly with weapons.

A lot of American Solitaire revolves around firearms. Slinger knows them and possesses some good ones. There are constant flashbacks to his iconic rifle instruction by his father. He also tells Emmett about the first weapon he got in the service, an M-16, and how he learned to assemble and disassemble a rifle blindfolded. He visits a gun sales shop and admires a modern rifle that costs over three thousand dollars; and the salesman tries to sell him a pair of vintage pistols used in a film.

Everyone in this film is to some extent imploding. The worst example is Auggie, whose repression i destroys him. We learn we should not say someone "committed suicide" but "lost his life to suicide," because "suicide is not a crime." After what happens to Auggie, we see the spinoff of inner torment to his relatives. Perhaps worst affected is Emmett, and Slinger attempts to take Emmett in hand and help him.

American Solitaire avoids preaching - until it takes us to a church with Emmett and Slinger, where Rev. Clay
Dylan Kussman, who in fact does preach against violence and weapons and identifies the parts of the Bible that call for beating swords into plowshares (Matthew 26:52, . He also recitres some of the most impressive statistics about gun violence in America: 43,000 gun related deaths a year, 120 people a day, 22 US veteran suicides every day. Slinger and Emmett have gathered up and brought Slinger's and Auggie's collections of weapons to the church, where they participate in breaking them up and forging the the metal into, for one thing, a shovel whose wooden handle has the name,"August" on it.

In fact this movie stresses that names are "powerful," and explains the meanings of the names Athena ("truth," also "war")f, Alexander (Slinger's original name: "protector" or "defender") and Emmett ("truth" or "reliability" - but he was named after Emmett Till).

American Solitaire, 95 mins., premiered at Coronado Island, Nov. 7, 2025. It opens at Cinema Village, NYC Apr. 17, 2026.

[Chris Knipp]

JESSIE BUCKLEY IN THE BRIDE!

MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL: THE BRIDE! (2026)

TRAILER

Creatures on the run

Beware the title that has an exclamation point at the end of it: something's probably wrong. This time more like everything: this movie is totally incoherent and those who stick with it through its entire two-iplus hours will get few rewards. This so-to-speak "reassessment" of Mary Shelley's work and "a bonkers feminist call-to-arms" (as NME puts it) wastes Jessie Buckley's considerable talents in the leads as Ida, The Bride, and Mary Shelley, as well as those of the others involved. Those include Annette Bening as Dr. Euphronious, Christian Bale as the Creature or the Monster, here domesticated and addressed as Frank; Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as a Thirties detective team, as well as Maggie Gyllenhaal's brother Jake, John Magaro and various others who are wandering around in this catastrophically meandering tale.

How it is a blow for feminism for there to be a female Frankenstein monster with a female mad scientist to craft her is a point that lost me right at the beginning. But that's the way it goes. Every underrepresented group wants to have representation on all sides of the spectrum, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is never out of fashion. And after all, Mary Shelley was a woman. So we need a female monster and a movie directed by a woman about her.

NME calls the film "an outlier in the Frankenstein canon," and admits "They don’t come much wilder and weirder." But that's just a nice way of saying this is a mess. Film critic Johnny Oleksinski of The New York Post, a newspaper that does not mince its words, calls The Bride! "one of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job." A Metacritic citizen critic wrote, "the feminist overtones or should we say overt-tones makes it a cringe fest, most female characters are as you would expect in such a story, insufferable." This points to a major aspect of this film's failure, its effort to illustrate all kinds of things that are never integrated into fluent storytelling. The one positive thing is the film's colorful evocation of 1930s America, which is a visual delight.

Things start out well enough, with the Frankenstein monster's well-known loneliness and desire for a mate. It's the fact that this desire can't be fulfilled that makes the original tale pathetic and compelling, awakens our sympathy for the pitiful, hideous creature. As The Bride! begins, the Creature in his loneliness has made his way to 1930s Chicago, where he finds Dr. Euphronious and begs her to fashion a mate for him. This mad lady scientist and her laboratory would seem over-the-top had we not just witnessed Guillermo del Toro's more palatial Frankenstein workshop a few months ago. While del Toro's craftsmanship is arguably over-elaborate, his film follows the Mary Shelley story unusually faithfully. We're on new, uncertain ground this time.

Gyllenhaal's Frankenstein Creature, played by Christian Bale, is a throwback to earlier versions, the more obviously so, and a disappointment, after the subtle, sympathetic, visually complex one fashioned in del Toro's film and so beautifully played by Jacob Elordi. With Bale's Monster we're back to the traditional big stitches across the face, the squarish head, the lumpish movements. Not very sexy. Dr. Euphronious domesticates him by calling him "Frank." This usage is jarring as are the many uses of F-words: the writing as a recreation of 1930s American English is tone-deaf from the get-go. "Frank's" new mate, played by Jessie Buckley, is similarly disappointing. She is a scruffy blonde with a big black smudge to one side of her mouth, who comes into being from a dug-up corpse in a great flash of static and light. What is to become of this couple? The chemistry is a dud.

It seems a failure how little visual invention appears in the handling of the two monsters or their interactions. Discussions of whether they will have sex or love founder. The filmmakers seem to be improvising as they go along, and, not knowing what to make of the couple they have created, resolve upon making much of the film into a Bonnie and Clyde story that clumsily develops out of this new unon, which soon turns lawless and murderous. Strangely, there are followers, who emulate the female Creature by wearing dark smudges to one side of their mouths too. The film uses Jessie Buckley rather awkwardly also to play Mary Shelley, who appears periodically to comment on the events.

And on and on. All this continues for far too long a time and never ceases to be chaotic. The only delight comes through the Thirties recreations. There is downtown Chicago at night and then downtown New York City at night. Both of them are full of neon and spectacular. The odd couple develops a peculiar relationship to the cinema and like to go to a movie after they've done something violent. This never makes much sense, but leads to several nice bits of mise-en-scène: frequenting the exciting big Times Square movie houses; then attending an early drive-in movie theater. These are two of the best images of the film.

The Bride! has no shortage of handsome images. Unfortunately the many closeups of the two creatures aren't among them. Nor are the interactions of the pair or all the trouble they create, or all the trouble officers of the law go to to track them down ever as interesting as the old cars and the spectacular period neon.

Jessie Buckley is the frontrunner in the Best Actress category at this year’s Oscars for her performance in Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025). She didn't need this. But she got it. You can skip it.

The Bride, 126 min., premiered in London Feb. 26, 2026, opening theatrically in many countries Mar. 4 and Mar. 5. Its Metacritic rating is 56%. In France its AlloCiné critics rating is 2.4=48%.

[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%.