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]

MALA EMDE IN KÖLN 75

IDO FLUK: KÖLN 75 (2025)

A zealous teenage German promoter turns a doomed concert into the most famous solo piano album of all time

This story begins with keyboard artist Keith Jarrett: his brilliance, his passion, and the risky ego that led him in the early seventies to start touring halls playing solo piano concerts improvised entirely from scratch each night. But a primary focus of this film is someone most of us never previously heard of: a teenage German girl called Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) - sixteen when first seen, claiming to be twenty-five - whose drive, ambition, and desire to prove her dentist father wrong about her lack of a future in music promotion led her to stage a concert that seemed doomed, but has gone on to sell over 3.5 million albums.

The Köln Concert (TKC) is a live solo piano improvisation double album (two-discs on vinyl) by Jarrett recorded at the Opera House in Köln, West Germany on 24 January 1975 that is reportedly both the all time best-selling solo jazz album and the all time best-selling piano album. Jarrett is eighty now and, crippled by strokes since 2018, unable to play with his left hand, but this achievement is likely to stand. Jarrett is worth remembering because of his versatility, not only in those glorious, wildly self-indulgent and awesomely confident solo improvisation concert performances - I've been listening to them for a while and one can happily get lost in them for many an hour - but his beloved jazz Standards Trio with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums, and, not to be forgotten, a number of fine classical recordings. Jarrett is a uniquely versatile musical personality, was so in 1975 and remains so.

His first notable solo improvisation album was earlier, and was called Facing You. On its fiftieth anniversary pianist Kenny Werner said of the seminal album, "For me, it changed everything," explaining, "He introduced a totally fresh way of playing over his changes. It sounded totally original."

The Cologne concert all started with Ronnie Scott. And a 16-year-old Vera Brandes who wanted to make money. In the couple of years since Ronnie asked her to book him, just assuming she could and turning out to be right, she had built a career as a concert promoter. She had panache, it seems. Jazz Bunny, a big headline called her, in a flashy article her family mocked her for. Soon she had booked a lot of jazz acts, making enough to move out of the family home and rent her own office. It was jazz, not rock n' roll, she was booking. Berlin in the seventies was a jazz mecca.

This film dramatizes all this - Vera's life - and the "scaffolding" she built - in the filmmaker's metaphor - by creating a framework in which the Köln concert could happen.

The early seventies was a time of ferment and musical crossover and Keith Jarrett was a kind of crux or apex of those explorations. Jarrett was a prodigy keyboardist - he rejected an invitation to study classical piano with Nadia Boulanger in Paris to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston with its strong jazz focus. Jarrett had been a pianist for Miles Davis. Miles reportedly asked him to play in his group three times before he consented, this film tells us, suggesting that shows a great degree of panache or chutzpah. Miles Davis' searing Bitches Brew had come out in March 30, 1970. His hypnotic In a Silent Way was from the year previous. Miles had expressed incomprehension of Jarrett's ability to play "out of nothing."

In Berlin the girl saw Keith Jarrett play the first time. Jarrett is played by John Magaro, who has fuzzy hair, but doesn't much resemble Jarrett. But remember, this is a recollection of Vera Brandes (Mala Emde, old for the role, being the age Brandes claimed to be, not the age she was). Vera set her sights on the Cologne Opera House, rebuilt in modernist style after the war and having 1,300 seats. Vera insisted. The evening she wanted Alban Berg's opera Lulu. was scheduled. Then it will have to be after eleven, when the instruments were removed and the place cleaned up. Eleven p.m. in January? January 24? You are mad, the theater manager says. But she goes ahead, knowing she will need nothing - only the opera house's Bösendorfer Imperial concert grand piano. But that Bosendorfer turned out to be the biggest problem.

There was a big Keith Jarrett solo concert in Lausanne before Cologne. He was coming from the Swiss city to the German one to play now.

Another key figure in this tale is Manfred Eicher (Alexander Scheer), a record producer and founder of ECM records. He was touring with Jarrett, and ECM was destined to be a major supporter of Jarrett and recorder of his improvisations. Also important here is Michael Watts (Michael Chernus), a journalist who wrote about jazz sent to interview Keith Jarrett. Watts talks directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. He tells us how hard it is to improvise completely. Even the most advanced jazz players don't do it. They hang their playing on "standards" or a set composition and number of bars, Watts explains to us.

Jarrett is exhausted by these one-hour pure-improvisation concerts. Before Cologne, he is strung out from the coughing in the audience, and he has a bad back which is bothering him. He and Manfred are driving on the tour in a little car to save money, because it turns out they are cashing in the plane tickets the promoter gives them at the airports to have the funds to continue on the tour. It's not making money. Michael Watts bums a ride with them and writes about Keith without admitting he has been in the car because---no interviews!

Jarrett's 1975 Cologne album isn't his first but the third in this mode, nor necessarily his best, but his most famous. The first was the aforementioned Facing You (Oslo 1971), the second Bremen/Lausanne (1973). Director Ido Fluk has gathered actors to recreate the event that is now legendary. Keith Jarrett's fans are worshipful, and they will want to watch and fantasize about what it would have been like to be there that cold January night in Cologne when the magic happened.

This film shows how you can make something lasting and famous out of virtually nothing. That goes, in a way, for the film itself. It gets some things right: for example, that Keith Jarrett's solo piano improvisations are not jazz (not just jazz, not just classical; a kind of crossover genre). They are something special also because, as the film stresses through Michael Watts, improvisation from scratch is very hard to do. These can be contrasted with Brad Meldau's solo improv piano concerts, for instance, which are wide-ranging, but return to known elements. Jarrett's material is abstract. Mehldau, while also improvising, frequently incorporates pre-composed material, including classical pieces and his own compositions, into his solo shows. Jarrett never did that. Jarrett's more remote, etheriel solo concerts take their wrapt audiences out into somewhere in outer space.

It's not entirely clear how it happens, but at eleven p.m. that January night the Cologne Opera House has sold out for Jarrett's concert. We have seen Vera had work to promote it with handbills, radio announcements, and in the end even selling tickets directly on the street. This film is about that promotion, and that energy. And always the almost-didn't-happen element of the event.

And there is drama. When the day came, they couldn't get that Bösendorfer Imperial Grand. It wasn't there. The piano that was there was lousy. In the final hours before the concert, while Alban Berg's opera Lulu is being performed at the opera house, Vera is rushing around finding piano tuners and persuading them to tune the lousy piano with the opera in the background. They have to work some kind of magic. But, apparently, Keith Jarrett worked some kind of magic too; and so did Vera.

Given the terrible conditions, particularly the lousy piano, Jarrett wanted to cancel the recording. (They could not cancel the concert.) But Manfred said the engineers were scheduled to be there, so they agreed to go ahead and record - but just for their own information, they thought. It did not turn out that way.

The film doesn't use sounds from the actual concert recording, just a few hints of Jarrett's playing, but hopefully viewers, even non-Jarrett fans, will understand that he did weave magic in his solo improvisations. That's why there is this story to be told. Jarrett's solo playing is special. It's not to dance to or rock to. It's to sit with folded hands and let it flow over you. It can be somewhat overpowering. If it works, it can feel transcendent - that's why staging this concert in the hour before midnight made sense, after all.

Köln 75 will appeal to Keith Jarrett fans, but could lead others to take a listen. This is a cute story about youthful drive, and also a piece of modern musical history.

Köln 75, 112 mins., premiered at the Berlinale Feb. 16, 2025; also Sofia, Istanbul; and opened in eight other countries. Now opening in the US, Oct. 17 in New York, Oct. 24 in Los Angeles.


KEITH JARRETT PERFORMING IN GERMANY IN 1975

[Chris Knipp]

LÉA DRUCKER IN CASE 137

DOMINIK MOLL: CASE 137 (2025)

Thankless truth or unnecessary obsession?

Veteran and busy French actress Léa Drucker (recently reviewed by me in Auction and Last Summer) here plays a tireless, dedicated Paris police internal affairs investigator who looks into the severe head injury suffered by a young "Yellow Vest" (Gilet Jaune) demonstrator which evidence shows was caused by police. It's a tough job: nobody seems to like or approve what she's doing, and in the end her results are inconclusive. This is a precise point-by-point film (as was Moll's The Night of the 12th but less successfully) that illustrates how outwardly thankless some absolutely necessary jobs can turn out to be.

It's part of the point that Stéphanie (Drucker's role) is herself sharply conflicted. The injured youth turns out to be from her small hometown, Saint-Dizier; and yet her close associates and her ex-husband are cops. Yet after she has done a tireless search for the police culprit in the injury, a superior suggests she was not even-handed and might be taken off the case or suspended. This is mad: she is conflicted, not biased. There's a difference.

The film gets lost in detail but in a good way. It's important that we learn specifics like that what Stéphanie works for is the IGPN, the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale. We need to know that this was a big demo, which was all over the news and centered on the high-profile Champs-Élysée part of Paris; that other branches of the service untrained for crowd control were called in for it and armed with flash ball guns (which are what clearly caused the severe injury) and that some fired them indiscriminately and without knowledge. And we need to meet the chief suspects and hear their slick denials.

Case 137 moves from in-office conducted police procedural to thriller when the investigation directs to a luxury hotel and a hotel room cleaner who works there, Alicia, played by Guslagie Malaga (best known for Alice Diop’s courtroom drama Saint Omer), who was cleaning a posh suite of the hotel when the demo assault occurred and who conveniently shot the key action with her phone. It turns out to be rather hard to get her footage from Alicia (and Stéphanie goes much to far to do so), only for it to turn out be, ultimately, inconclusive.

This is the point, and makes Case 137 a perfect sequel for Moll's Night of the 12th, which goes into great detail about an unsolved murder, a "cold case." An additional thread here is that police work is not only often thankless, but often unpopular. Stéphanie's young son reflects this when he reports more than once in domestic scenes that he's learned people don't like cops. Stéphanie has to make a little speech to young Victor (Solàn Machado-Graner) about the necessity of law enforcement, no matter how some react to it.

This film may be itself, indeed, more necessary than The Night of the 12th, because we know all about unsolved murders but we know much less of the complexities of maintaining police discipline. Again the specific detail is admirable and parts of the investigation seem almost real-time. The detail is never anything but extremely well done. But, lacking the inherent excitement and color of the murder investigation, it tends to seem a bit dry and humorless at times. The precision is allowed to undercut the human element; Moll needed to let his story breathe more.

Case 137/Dossier 137, 115 mins., premiered at Cannes in Competition, showing at Edinburgh, Zurich, Hamburg, Jakarta, Leiden and Lyon. To be released in the U.S. Nov. `9, 2025. Metacritic rating: 73%.

[Chris Knipp]

AMBER FARES: COEXISTENCE MY ASS

An Israeli stand-up comic's brave and intelligent peacekeeping efforts

This is a documentary portrait of Israeli-born stand-up comic Noam Shuster Eliassi, whose show intelligently tackles the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the struggle for equality, challenging audiences with uncomfortable truths. She is big, bold, zoftig, feminine, ebullient, always authentic and of course funny. But we will see her weep. What makes this film moving and perhaps very sad is that it spans from 2020 and Covid (and she got Covid, and was sent to quarantine at a Jerusalem hotel and performed stand-up to her fellow patients there, who included both Israelis and Palestinians). It runs through the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the brutal genocide of Gaza by Israel that has used that attack as its pretext. How do you laugh at this?

Bold humor about such events would only seem cruel and evil. Noam doesn't do that, of course. She leads demos, and she goes into the street and interviews people. Most of them are not of her liberal persuasion and she quickly turns away from them.

As Noam points out, Netanyahu became president when she was seven. A criminal now, he hass sought to gain authorization to neuter the judiciary. Her Iranian-Jewish mother and Romanian-Jewish father are very supportive of her. It is good to be reminded that such people still exist in Israel, but the mood there is very extreme. It is proof of Noam's resilience that she can still be there and speak up. However it seems that the arrival of October 7 the day after Noam meets, she says, a wonderful guy, may have nipped the relationship in the bud.

Noam comes from a place of humanity that can be traced, no doubt, to her inner nature, but also to growing up in a special place in Israel called Neve Shalom, which means Oasis of Peace, in Arabic Wahat as-Salam (واحة السلام). Here she studied together as equals with Arab kids. She also acquired fluency in spoken Arabic at an early age. Her intelligence and charisma and her eloquence about peace led at first in other directions, like a United Nations job and working towards peacekeeping in the Middle East. But she had that sense of humor too, and that turned out to be the best way to convey her message.

She performs in Hebrew and also in English. and Arabic As she says and we see early in the film, she can be provocative more easily in the US; it's harder to get away with joking about the politics in ISrael. As she says she needs to "grow bigger balls" for that. "Don’t worry, I’m only going to be here for seven minutes, not 70 years," she says with pointed irony to a Palestinian audience that explodes in laughter.

Earlier, Noam says, the takeoff point of her routines was occupation; now it is genocide. The film and Noam's life and career are a focus for the question of how comedy can deal with violence. It works when the violence is at one remove, but when Noam and her friends and relatives all lose loved ones in the October 7 attack, the smiling and the detachment stop.

Noam is a very dominant personality, big in every way (though she is also quite appealing), so it is important for balance that he other people in her life, and the school and community of Neve Shalom where she grew up are also well represented by Fares' film. It's especially important to see her Palestinian best friend, Ranin, from early days, and her supportive parents. We learn that they come from a Persian background and there is a small thread about Noam and her Persian Jewish grandmother. They had a loving relationship even while not speaking the same language. Her grandmother dies and we glimpse the funeral (why are the men not better dressed?) and the tombstone is covered with Hebrew writing and a emblazoned with a star of David.

Then, after October 7 and the assault on Gaza, the school Noam attended is torched. She and her friend go and walk through it. Why? they ask. She knows why October 7 occurred and it is the occupation. She says this publicly, and she is attacked for that. Still, Israel sometimes at least remains a democracy where dissent, if not appreciated, is tolerated, at least if you're an Israeli Jew. What comes out in Noam's on-the-street interviews is that Israelis want to further democracy - for Jews. Rights for Arabs? That can come later, perhaps; not now.

Of course there is not much room for subtlety here, however much we would have liked subtlety. I would have liked more precision about Noam's changes as a stand-up comic through the course of these four years. It isn't clear when some early, catchy scenes of stand-up in the US actually took place, or whether Noam is going back to it, or has changed permanently to a more serious kind of appearance, a possibility that is discussed. I'm not sure quite enough time is spent explaining the title "Coexistence, My Ass!" that Noam gives her show, used also for the film, originally developed on an invitation from Harvard University. The basic point is clear tough, that peaceful coexistence can only exist between equals, not between oppressors and oppressed). Nonetheless as a portrait, thanks to the vibrancy and authenticity of Noam Shuster Eliassi, issues come to life and we are moved.

Coexistence, My Ass! 95 mins., premiered at Sundance Jan. 26, 2025, showing also at Thessaloniki, CPH DOX,also showing at a dozen other festivals, including SF Jewish, Busan, and Woodstock. It opens in the US Oct. 29, 2025.

[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]

PEDRO KOS: IN OUR BLOOD (2024)

Reunion goes wildly wrong

The director normallly makes documentaries, and he adds that element into what winds up eventually being (spoiler alert) a vampire movie. One scene near the end is jaw-dropping in its violence because the filmmaking makes it almost for a moment seem real. The coverage of the location (houses and a homeless and addiction center in Los Cruces, New Mexico) is, for a horror movie, unusually naturalistic. Many of the bright natural light images are beautiful, none more than the slmost-still shots of the two and sky at the very end. On the other hand, Kos and his writer aren't particularly successful at pacing and suspense. Some people reportedly actually from a local center of the kind depicted, as minor characters, add an authentic look. On the other hand, some of the main actors were not so well directed and appear either overly glum or overly emphatic.

Reviewed for Variety by Dennis Harvey, who is in agreement that the documentary technique works well but that the horror elements are too little and too late for a genre film. He starts out by noting that found-footage horror is a genre that debuted with the brilliant 1999 Blair Witch Project and that every year or two someone tries to produce a zinger in its wake but this isn't that zinger.

The direction of actors is less successful than the use of local setiingg. From the start the leads, Brittany O'Grady (of "White Lotus") playing a filmmaker called Emily Wyland, and E.J. Bonilla as her cameraman Danny Martinez seem under-directed and in need of constraint, especially Bonilla. This is true of others, such as Alanna Ubach, as Emily's estranged mother Sam, why seems too emotional, too mawkish, and Leo Marks, who plays a slightly deranged local man. And so on.

I have only good things to say about the use of local settings, particularly the handsome natural-lighting shots of ordinary Los Cruces, New Mexico urban landscape and skies, which are beautiful, especially toward the end. But that would not be what you go to this movie for. I will say that I remember a violent final scene, and those sunlit buildings and sky.

In Our Blood 89 mins., debuted October 9, 2024 at Screamfest Horror Film Festival in Los Angeles. The Letterboxd score of 3.3 is decent and the current comments there are good. It opens in theaters Oct. 24, 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

Lindsay Addario

JIMMY CHIN, ELIZABETH CHAI VASARHELYI: LOVE+WAR (2025)

Can a mom be a war photographer?*

TRAILER

PORTFOLIO OF ADDARIO'S PHOTOGRAPHY

Lindsay Addario is a war photographer. Paul de Bendern is her husband, a former Reuters correspondent who runs a news agency in London. They have two young sons. The sons were born after she went to cover the Arab Spring in Libya and got kidnapped with three male American journalists. This troubling incident may be too briefly dealt with, and shows how the material here is sometimes hard for a film like this to cover adequately. Lindsay comes from a loving family, with a mother and a gay dad who were hairdressers in Connecticut, and three sisters, who love her.

This National Geographic-produced film does a neat trick in covering the conflict between being a normal human being and doing one of the riskiest jobs on the planet - on the one hand - and - on the other hand - many of the extraordinary stories, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan, Libya, most of the hottest hot spots of the last two decades, that we see Lindsay covering right in the thick of it. Whoever filmed her on these missions also risked their lives, as she did, photojournalists she collaborates with such as Ukrainian Andriy Dubcha and Thorsten Thielow.

Kudos are due also to the team of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who won the Best Documentary Oscar six years ago for Free Solo, about climber Alex Honnold. This is not as rare and unusual or shot-for-the film material as Alex Honnold was, but the duo's coverage of the war photographer life here is superb.

The film leaves us impressed - after all, her work makes a difference, in several cases dramatically. One of her photos of Ukrainian civilians killed by Russia, on the front page of the New York Times, (which she works for independently, with The National Geographic and Time) went viral and became a key image of the conflict. Other coverage of women dying in childbirth led to a $500 million grant from pharmaceutical executives that helped reverse this situation. She has received a Pulitzer and a MacArthur genius grant. The still and film coverage of Lindsay's work in combat locations is impressive. Leslie Felperin in her Hollywood Repor.ter review calls it "a visually harrowing but often ravishing record. . ." The rich but concise coverage of the career owes much to the skillful editing of Keiko Deguchi and Hypatia Porter

But the film also leaves us troubled. A better title might be not "Love Plus War" but "Love Minus War" because those who love Lindsay, most of all her two young sons, are made to suffer by the work she does. The boys care enormously about their mother, are tremendously excited when she reappears for a spell, but she is basically an absentee mom. At one point one of her sons becomes sullen and distant, and the other regresses and begins wetting the bed. Her job takes a direct toll on them. But she cannot curtail it. She is somewhat distant when at home in London, and asserts that it is at war working that she feels most at home and when with husband and sons she feels she should be doing her crucial work. That work takes its toll on her too: he has the look in her eyes sometimes of one who has seen much death and cannot shake it off.

Lindsay denies that she's an adrenaline junky or that that is what it's about, but admits that what gets you hooked is the size of what you're dealing with. Iraq, Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, Russian and Ukraine: she has plunged into the perilous nerve center of the biggest news stories of the day. She suggests that this is a calling, even a duty: people urgently need to know what her images tell them. What I got out of this film that was new is the idea that those who make war don't want us to see what is going on.

What nis also deeply troubling and most evident with Israel's genocide in Gaza is that people can sometimes indifferently watch horror perpetrated a people day after day for two years and basically do nothing. Lindsay, who is heard from frequently in this film, admits sometimes she wonders if what she is doing is worth it, or means anything. It is worth it and she does it extremely well. The film also names a roll call of other great and too little remembered female war correspondents, and partly of course Lindsay's sex is the reason for making this film. An officer from Restrepo (about which there is a notable war documentary) describes Lindsay and a female colleague who covered them in their ultra-dangerous conflict zone as being "hard as woodpecker lips," thus trustworthy de facto additions to their unit, but the phrase, Felperin suggests, "apt but perhaps not entirely a compliment." The film [I Restrepo[/I] (2010) is about the craziness and the danger of American soldiers' lives in Afghanistan, and was made by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. When Hetherington died in Libya of shrapnel wounds it is a shock to Lindsay, who knew him from Afghanistan, and a warning of how dangerous Libya was. And then she was kidnapped there. Her work in Afghanistan illustrating the plight of women under the Taliban first hand is an illustration of how Lindsay's gender, which she sometimes supersedes, can sometimes also be a special asset.

War correspondents are a special breed. One of them, also now a New Yorker editor, notes that Lindsay's "pictures" are proof or how good she is at it - "and that she's still alive." But this is a craft and art and calling that Lindsay's loved ones might prefer for her to leave. In showing this conflict and the family's role as it does this film provides a more three-dimensional portrait of this almost superhuman breed than usual, even if the material at times feels a little rushed-over to fit the compact runtime.

Love+War, 95 mins., premiered at TIIF Sept. 7, 2025. It showed at over a dozon other mostly local US fests, but including Mill Valley, BFI London, and AFI. Opens in theaters starting Oct. 24, 2025, West Coast Oct. 31.

__________
*My title comes from a review of a memoir by Addario published in 2015, not mentioned here, entitled What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War.


Lindsay Addario

[Chris Knipp]

RAOUL PECK: ORWELL 2 + 2 = 5 (2025)

Ruminating about George Orwell's current significance

Not Peck's best work, this is a sketch portrait of the great English essayist George Orwell (Eric Blair) used to ruminate on the evils of totalitarianism, the perils for our future, and the virtues of democratic socialism. There is a big emphasis on Orwell's most famous long work the dystopian novel 1984 (the equally popular short one is of course Animal Farm). 1984 imagines a super-grim totalitarian future, and is famous for giving us catchwords like "doublethink," "newspeak," "thought police," "Big Brother," and "unperson," which have become part of the language. It would seem that we are sometimes obviously, sometimes imperceptibly, losing the freedom and clarity we once may have had, though the undermining of western democracy appears more subtle. In a notable clip here Edward Snowden worries that people may just take no notice of his revelations about the growth of massive US government surveillance.

Peck tells his somewhat meandeering story with a mishmash of clips and hushed (and also loud) voiceovers (by Damian Lewis who played Henry VIII in the excellent series "Wolf Hall") whose very purpose is unclear at times. Is this a political treatise? Is it an essay on Orwell? Or is it mainly interested in 1984? For much of the way, I wasn't sure.

Peck takes up various concerns of Orwell, including the predation of the Brithsh Empire on its colonies. A concern implicit in many of his works is disinformation, and Peck relates this to the apparent justifications by world leaders of ethnic cleansing, and how AI bodes ill for an informed electorate.

This film makes free use of two of the film adaptations of 1984 which don't fit very well together, also splicing in factoids about Orwell's life. The end result was to make me want to leave off watching the film to simply reread the book and compare the 1956 ad 1984 films, all of which seem more interesting than Peck's film. So is Orwell's life. The subtitle (if that is what it is), "2 + 2 = 5" draws attention to a central point of Orwell's novel, that a totalitarian regime distorts facts to suit its own interests and subjugate its victims. This is no doubt a central concern of Peck also, highly relevant in today's world of increasing misinformation, disinformation, and an American would-be dictator who speaks of "fake news" but constantly lies himself. Toward the end of the film, Peck lists some "newspeak"-like terms with their "real" meanings, such as: "special military operation = invasion of Ukraine," "vocational training center = concentration camp," "pacifrication = elimination of unreliable elements," "legal use of force = police brutality," "illegals = refugees," and, my favorite, "antisemitism = weaponized term to silence critics of Israeli military action" - though one could avoid the jargon of "weaponized" and just say "excuse to repress a pro-Palestine stand." Peck adds a quote from a letter where Orwell announces the plan to write a pan of Jean-Paul Sartre's then-new book Anti-Semite and Jew and says "The less talk there is about 'the Jew' or 'the anti-Semite' as a species of animal different from ourselves the better."

These are interesting but scarcely related points. Peck never quite has me with him mosts of the way through this film as he skips along on his nonlinear journey through Orwell's life, from the early upbringing (but skipping the key four years at Eton, and key attachments) and the development of his political awareness and anti-colonialist feelings to the writing of what became his last book on the island of Jura while suffering from the worsening of the tuberculosis that would kill him a few years later, famous at last but with his life cut short. (Peck uses tuberculosis bacilli as a visual motif.)

Orwell was born in the far east and went back to it. He spent time in North Africa and wrote a book in Marrakesh. He had interesting experiences of poverty and travel and the Spanish Civil War that led to important books, Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, and did an immense amount of other writing. Nonetheless a few Hemingway types apart, writers write, their living goes into their books, and their lives are less interesting tnan their works. I feel that the clips from the two films ask us to confuse 1984's protagonist Winston Smith as played by Edmond O'Brien and John Hurt, with versions of George Orwell himself. It seems all very impressionistic and arbitrary. And not enlightening. What do we learn from this melange?

RogerEbert.com reviewer Monica Castillo seems to agree, commenting that this film f"eels unfinished," with some of its ideas feeling "sprinkled into Orwell’s life story, creating a disjointed feeling..."

Read the novel 1984 instead, alone with Animal Farm and Orwell's other great books. Read also a bio of the man (even the Wikipedia article is interesting, if only a start). Learn about the writer's formative years at Eton, when Cyril Connolly was his friend when they were taught French by Aldous Huxley. Classmates at Eton with Orwell, if I've got my dates right, included John Strachey, Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton, Oliver Messel, Brian Howard, and the novelists Anthony Powell and Henry Green. Though they didn't all know each other, this was a happy and much more important period for Orwell than his preceding time at the boarding school preparatory school: St Cyprian's that he delights so much in complaining of in his long essay "Such, Such Were the Joys." Watch the film adaptations of the 1984. You don't need to watch this film unless you are a Raoul Peck completist.

Orwell 2 + 2 = 5, 119 mins., premiered at Cannes, showing at a number of other festivals, including Sydney, Toronto, Rio and London BFI. It opened in the US Oct. 3 (IFC Center) and comes to the West Coast Oct. 10. Metacritic rating: 74%.

[Chris Knipp]

GABRIEL BYRNE IN DEATH OF A LADIES' MAN

MATT BISSONETTE: DEATH OF A LADIES' MAN (2020)

A life of self-indulgence pays off

Even Bissonete's first film, Looking for Leonard, showed an obsession for fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen's songs, and they are distributed all over this one, even with accompanying song and dance numbers. They seem the fruit of an obsession, not of necessity. Josh Slater-Williams says in his BFI Sight and Sound review that "this is Bissonete's most explicitly Leonard Cohen-inspired work to date," adding "but just why he made this movie, besides love for the songs, remains unclear."

Addiction plays an explicit part here too. The subject is Sam O'Shea (Gabriel Byrne) an alcoholic poetry professor. The Irish actor has been in some great films, including Miller's Crossing, Little Women, Dead Man and The USual Suspects. He does not discredit himself here, though where this film is going and where it comes from is frequently in doubt. It is an inexplicable indulgence, full of fantasies, visions, obtrusive songs and group performances, with a loser's tragic downward spiral that turns into a final series of implausible successes. All is filled with overconfident imagination. Chapter headings can't hide the lack of a plausible structure or real momentum. But hey, maybe you're crazy about Leonard Cohen. Some people are. And there are some watchable actors.

One review (Cath Clarke's positive one in the Guardian) points logically to Philip Roth, because this is indeed a literary tale. "If Philip Roth had ever switched his attention from the great American novel and decided to write a lightweight indie dramedy," writes Cath, "it might have turned out like this." This film indeed is the wish fulfillment fantasy (which turns, somewhat implausibly, real) of a hard drinking wannabe literary lion, not Jewish, of course, but certainly ethnic, and with his young Irish dead dad to add the juicy Irish brogue (played by another well known actor from Eire, Brian Gleeson), who turns up frequently among a series of hallucinations, puffing on cigarettes and (somewhat anachronistically) spouting F-words like everybody else.

This kind of tale of literary dishevelment often begins with domestic mess, and early on Sam enters his apartment to find a robust, longhaired younger man having at it with his wife, herself younger than him, in their bed. This leads to altercations and a mutual decision to make this Sam's second divorce. He embarks on a drunken spree, apparently not very unlike his daily routine. Along the way he eyes young women, but he's past his prime and they smack him or give him the finger - except in an inexplicable borderline offensive extended fantasy late in the film when a beautiful ex-model with the implausible name of Charlotte LaFleur (Jessica Paré) instantly falls madly in love with the man who admits to sixty-two (the actor was ten years older).

Sam goes next to the lecture hall, where he throws up into a bin and then addresses the bank of students; but that fades into another hallucination and the students all get up and dance to Leonard Cohen. Hurrah! A friend later advises Sam to see a physician, and he goes to the improbably named Dr. Sarah Savard (Pascale Bussières), who never once sounds or looks like a doctor, but tells Sam, following an initial interview and an MRI, that he has an inoperable tumor infecting every high functioning part of his brain. What can be done? he asks. Well, she more or less says, you can die. She gives him a few months to a year.

From here on Sam looks better than ever. This is partly attributed to his acknowledging his alcoholism and entering into sobriety. He winds up in one of those AA meetings you see in movies where a small group of people sit in chairs in a circle with nice lighting in a big open space and one person shares, and then the protagonist. Except that Sam gets to have a share liberally laced with colorful flashbacks before he says his "thank you for letting me share."

This is where things look up for Sam. Relations may improve with his gay son Layton (Antoine Olivier Pilon) and he helps look after his heroin addict daughter Josée (Karelle Trembley). There are several scenes in French in the film, by the way, which in my screener version lacked English subtitles and I was unable to decipher. He embarks on that project he has said earlier he has always wanted to do: writing a book. It is a memoir, containing many of the incidents alluded to in this film in conversations with the dead dad or the hallucinations and other scenes. And the book is a success, signaled by the obligatory book reading and enthusiastic signing pointing to the presence of admiring fans, including close friends and family members and, in the back of the audience, Frankenstein, for the monster has featured, inexplicably, in several of Sam's hallucinations.

I don't know whether to say Philip Ross would have done better than this, or would have done this better. Roth concocted some far-fetched tales. This in some form indeed might have been one of them. But his would have contained very little Leonard Cohen, fewer hallucinations, and more wit.

Death of a Ladies' Man, 100 mins., debuted Sept. 24, 2024 at Calgary, also Cinequest, Sonoma, Galway, Mallorca, UK internet Jul. 25, 2022, US week of Sept. 22, 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

CAAMFEST May 8-11, 2025 Berkeley Three Muslim and Palestinian related films

PALESTINIAN LANDSCAPES
Palestinian Landscapes brings together two powerful films exploring empire, ecology, and resistance. Razan Alsalah’s A Stone’s Throw evokes dreamlike cycles of displacement and return across fragmented geographies shaped by resource and labor economies. In Foragers, Jumana Manna traces the criminalization of foraging in Palestine, revealing how colonial legal systems regulate access to land and tradition.

A Stone’s Throw, directed by Razan AlSalah
Sunday, May 11, 5:00 pm | Roxie
Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice, from land and labor, from Haifa to Beirut to a Gulf offshore oil platform. A Stone’s Throw rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.

Director Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher
*Screener available
Foragers, directed by Jumana Manna
Sunday, May 11, 5:00 pm | Roxie
Elderly Palestinians are caught between their right to forage their own land and the harsh restrictions imposed by their occupiers on the basis of preservation.
Director/Producer/Co-Editor Jumana Manna is a Palestinian visual artist

AGAINST AMNESIA: Screening & Seminar
This program, in partnership with the Berkeley-based Islamic Scholarship Fund, explores the intertwined histories and ongoing realities of displacement, colonial violence, and resistance in Palestine and Bangladesh. Through a narrative short about a Palestinian grandmother uprooted from her home and a documentary on the forgotten 1970s genocide in Bangladesh, the program highlights the the ways in which historical violence shapes mundane aspects of everyday life. A facilitated discussion will follow.

Bengal Memory, directed by Fahim Hamid
Sunday, May 11, 3:00 p.m. | AMC Kabuki 3
A Bangladeshi American explores his father’s memories of a forgotten genocide in their
native country and uncovers the controversial role the U.S. played in it.
Director/Producer/Editor Fahim Hamid was born in Bangladesh
*Screener available

Maqluba, directed by Mike Elsherif
Sunday, May 11, 3:00 p.m. | AMC Kabuki 3
Laila, a Palestinian-American drummer, visits her grandmother in her new apartment during a powerful storm under the guise of helping her unpack. But her nefarious goals slowly unfold as they delve deeper into the mystical fateful night.
Writer/Director/Producer Mike Elsherif is a Palestinian-American filmmaker
*Screener available


SHORT
Billo Rani, directed by Angbeen Saleem
Part of the Shorts Program: Centerpiece Shorts
Sunday, May 11, 12:00pm | Roxie
When Hafsa, a sparkly and impulsive 12-year-old girl, is made aware of her unibrow at Islamic Sunday School in a lesson on “cleanliness”, her eyebrows come alive and begin to speak to her.
The film is set in an Islamic Sunday School and centers around a South Asian Muslim girl
Director/Writer/Producer Angbeen Saleem is a Pakistani Muslim artist
*Screener Available


A Stone's Throw
https://vimeo.com/868181676
pw: 7aifa

Bengal Memory
https://gumlet.tv/watch/67dc1999982f3b096493d238
pw: DOC1971!

Maqluba
https://vimeo.com/998772961?ts=0&share=copy
pw: teta

Billo Rani
https://vimeo.com/1019601428?share=copy
pw: threaded
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