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]

MIKAL AND SMOKEY IN FLOPHOUSE AMERICA

MONICA STROMDAHL: FLOPHOUSE AMERICA (2025)

Tight quarters

Mikal was born and grew up in the very confined quarters of the cheap hotel where he lives, as this film begins, with his mother Tonya and father Jason. The Norwegian filmmaker Monica Strømdahl was in New York studying still photography when living in such hotels, known by the traditional derogatory term "flophouse," led her to meet this little family and gain their confidence to make this debut documentary. An article in Deadline suggests Mikal collaborated thinking if Tonya and Jason saw Monica's film they'd wake up and change their lives. Alas, that does not happen and only a tragic accident leads to escape toward the end of the three years covered here, which starts when Mikal is twelve. The director waited till he was eighteen and gave his consent to release the finished film.

This documentary of a small family living in poverty and alcoholism is at moments very hard to watch and it cannot be recommended to a general audience. It is for the few who look for deep dives into harsh social issues. But it is a worthy film, and in its strange way a beautiful one, due to its child protagonist's pluck and survival skills and his family's shared love. Jason is a survivor and has spirit. He is also articulate and at one point shows signs of being a poet. The room and bathroom have no kitchen and the dishes have to be washed in the bathtub. Tonya is a continual drunk, never leaving the hotel and lying around day and night in T shirt and panties. Jason goes out to work but drifts into alcohol when he comes home. Mikal goes to school, where he is doing poorly - understandable since he lives in such a depressing and claustrophobic environment. His sleeping area is separated from his parents' only by a flimsy curtain.

Mikal gets nagged by both parents for not doing homework and escaping into a video game. He resists when Jason nags him to wash the dishes piled up in the bathtub. Okay, Mikal says, and gives Jason a math problem from school and says, you do this problem, and I'll do the dishes. When Jason admits he can't do it, Mikal smiles broadly - it's the happiest he is in the whole film. They hug, and both share in doing the dishes in the bathtub.

That sequence reveals the tone of Flophouse America. There is plenty of bickering and strong language, but "I love you" is a sentence often heard. Jason and Mikal argue, but they also hug and touch - which is fortunate, since they are living on top of each other. Mikal also cuddles with their pet cat, Smokey.

In another strong and memorable sequence Mikal says this situation is making him crazy, and he should be in an insane asylum. He goes into a kind of rage, is ready to explode, and he grabs a plastic laundry hamper and bangs it over and over onto the floor. Jason says he understands this, and that Mikal can leave if he has to. He addresses his son sometimes as "sir". and "man." While this is inappropriate for a pre-teen boy, it also reveals the father to be respectful toward his son, even while he is critical sometimes and calls him names. Considering the circumstances, mother, father, and son show restraint, not descending into cruelty or violence.

But the squalor and misery of the situation are oppressive, grim, and claustrophobic. Sometimes Monica's camera shows scatterings of objects here and there in the room, the unwashed dishes, the poor little cat. Mikal is a pale, weak looking boy, and usually looks downcast and tired. Late in the film when he and Jason are moving things out of the room, Jason, taller now and with a deepened voice, says "Sorry I'm not macho."

One German review (listed on IMDb) thinks all this is false, and suspects altered scenes or scenes restaged for the camera. It could be complained that while we frequently see Mikal taking refuge huddled out in the hallway, we never see him at school or Jason at work. What is clear is that this isn't "fly on the wall" filmmaking, because you can't disappear in such small quarters. Monica nonetheless succeeds in disappearing. She's there and not there, like Nicolas Philibert in his 2002 elementary school documentary To Be and to Have, and the fact that I am reminded of one of my favorite documentaries of the last two-plus decades says something about Flophouse America..

Flophouse America, 80 mins., premiered at Movies That Matter (Netherlands) Mar. 22 and received honorable mention at CPH:DOX (Copenhagen) Mar. 24, 2025, showing also at half a dozen other European doc fests . Its North American premiere is set for DOC NYC Nov. 16, 2025 6:30 PM at Village East by Angelika, 181-189 2nd Ave.
Q&A to follow with director Monica Strømdahl. The film will also be available on the festival's virtual platform Nov. 17-30.

[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. Worse still, 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 L'inspection générale de la police nationale (IGPN). We need to know that this was a big demo, which was all over the news and centered on the high-profile Champs-Élysées 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 too 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 scene dialogues with his mom 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]

KLÁRA TASKÓVSKA: I'M NOT EVERYTHING I WANT TO BE (2025)

The making of a Czech photographer documented in hundreds of stills

Since Libuše Jarcovjáková (pronounced like "LEE-boo-SHAY YAR-kof-YAK-ova") has been called "the Nan Goldin of Czech photography" we can begin with Laura Poitras' 2022 All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the widely shown and admired film about Nan Goldin herself. It's a different story entirely. Nan Goldin hung out with druggy partying East Village artistic types. Libuše's parents were both painters, whouth only her father was paid for his work. Libuše struggled to make something of herself in the seventies and eighties in Prague and West Berlin, photographing marginalized people, like the Roma, also getting to Tokyo where, on the second trip, she began to make money. In Prague through a friend she discovers the place where LGBTQ of all stripes gather, the T Club, and this is another important series.

This film is narrated as a diaristic autobiographical account by the photographer Jarcovjáková herself (in Czech). It comprises a continuous fast-flipping chain of hers black and white photos (Goldin's were in a gooey rich color that photography galleries at first rejected), that form an account of her struggle to find herself and gain recognition. The flashing photos are accompanied with appropriate sound effects to make them seem more like a movie - crowd sounds, subway train sounds, the buzz of traffic, the chatter and clink of glasses in a bar - you name it. Sometimes - warning is given at the outset - there are minutes of brain-damaging-style fluttering flashes to illustrate a club that could hurt your eyes or give you a headache. The subject of this film is a heavy drinker and partier who documents monumental hangovers.

The first photos shown are landscapes, and austerely beautiful, which draws you in but is a bit misleading. The storytelling with beautiful stills makes one think of Chris Marker's 28-minute 1962 sci-fi film told with voiceover and still photos, La Jetée. La Jetée is a haunting tale of time travel, an enduring classic. This is an autobiographical one-thing-after-another account of a rough life.

Jarcovjáková recounts her struggle, starting from after high school when on several tries she can't get admitted to the university because her family isn't sufficiently communist. She strives to prove herself working class by working in a factory, but she gets kicked out. She has a penchant for alcohol, and entanglements with several men lead to unwanted pregnancies that aren't easy to end after the first one because she can't report to the state abortion clinic anymore.

Jarcovjáková is frumpy, grumpy, depressive earth mother type. (plump, with big pendulous breasts well displayed here) who in the long early segment of this film is constantly flailing about, not successful at anything else, but like a true photographer, always with camera in hand and always taking photographs. They are blurry, messy, ugly, but vital. SHe is like a rough news photographer of her owh life, every aspect of it. When she sleeps with a man, there are photos of him before and after, dressed and naked, and often of her naked staring into the camera. It's the kitchen sink school of photography. It's deliberately unbeautiful. Sometimes she finds a good subject, as when she gets an invitation to a Roma dance and this leads to a series of photographs of Roma people, though she doesn't seem to enter into their lives anything like, say, Larry Clark and the speed freaks of Tulsa or Danny Lyon and the motorcycle gang.

She marries one of the men, Named Franta, who turns out to have no ambition in any direction. Eventually the possibility of travel comes up. This is done through a "fake" marriage to a West German man called Helmut. (Ironically, he is handsome and cool.) Once Franka is persuaded to grant a divorce, Helmut and Libuše marry we glimpse long-haired Helmut in a suit grasping long-stemmed flowers. He disappears soon after (after perhaps a token night in the same bed) but now she has a travel permit.

With the travel permit Libuše goes to West Berlin. Nothing much happens but she gets hit by a Mercedes and lands in the hospital with a broken ankle. She photographs the hospital room with two old women. She declares that it's terrible to be old. Yes, it is terrible to be old--in a hospital with Libuše.

A friend invites Libuše to Tokyo. Here, she gets some fashion jobs that bring in money, but they don't satisfy her. She goes home. Back later in Berlin, she is present for 1989, the bringing down of the Wall, which of course she photographs. Sometimes it seems as if the photographs are not so good, but it is just that there are so many of them they can be used almost like a movie, with the narration and the sound effects. And with the voice and the many photos Libuše takes of herself, there's a strong sense that she is present and this is her life, her eye of the camera we're seeing through.

What's lacking here though, for all the self-portraits, which are usually as frumpy as Libuse herself, is much self-awareness or self-analysis. A major instance of this is that Libuše seems to be discovering that she likes women, but she never explains this. She just shows a couple of women she gets involved with. No, this is just the narrative of a rather random life, set apart by tireless photo-taking. Libuše gets depressed early on, when living at home with her parents, and is prescribed antidepressants, which seem to make her hyper. Another phase, another set of photographs. But no introspection. Notably, she is not analytical about her sexuality.

It all runs together somewhat, but clearly it's on her second trip to Japan that Libuše gets some real recognition, and this is when she has reached the age of 33, which earlier she has declared to be thought of by some as a crossroads and also a time when an accident might be in the cards. After the end of the film, there is some footage and signage - including the process of mounting a huge photo portrait of the photographer as the notice of an exhibition - that shows Libuše Jarcovjakova is now at last an international name in photography.

Though her early ife was so oppressive due to the Czech communist regime, Libuše seems never much tempted to emigrate to Germany or Japan or anywhere else. She has returned to Czechoslovakia and affirms that she wants to stay there.

Im Not Everything I want to Be, 90 mins, premiered at the Berlinale and showed at Copenhagen ((CPH DOX) and a number of other distinguished international documentary film festivals as well as Karlovy Vary, Camden, and the Viennale. It opens this week (Nov. 7,2025) at the Metrograph in New York via Grasshopper Films.

[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]

YDALIE TURK, UMBERTO ORSINI, AND BIRBA IN TRIFOLE

GABRIELE FABBRO: TRIFOLE (2024)

Big truffle gets away

The Langhe (Italian: [ˈlaŋɡe], Piedmontese: [ˈlɑŋɡe]; Latin: Mons Langa et Bassa Langa), usually Langa when referring to each of its subdivisions, is a historical hilly area to the south and east of the river Tanaro in the provinces of Cuneo and Asti in Piedmont, northern Italy. - Wikipedia.

What is authentic about this little film is its milieu, that region in Piemonte, the province of Piedmont, an area of little hills and woods where the splendid Italian white truffles are to be found, though the old man in the story has seen the woods adjoining his small property taken down to make more space for vines for the big wine companies of Italy. Also authentic is the truffle hunting dog, Birba, who never produces a false snuffle and in a sense is the true star, as are the truffle hunting dogs of the other movies about this subject of which they are the real stars.

As for the plot, the filmmaker Gabrielle Fabbro is a fabulist. She and her co-writer Ydalie Turk, who also has the very energetic lead role - she runs around a heck of a lot (but let's remember: running isn't acting) - are not even very sure what their story is. They fill in preposterous events and then toss them away when we've started to believe them. This affects the believability of the two main characters.

What is also true is, one supposes, that the career of forager (for Italian white truffles) is fragile and threatened. Such a person is Igor, who is played by Umberto Orsini, a Italian actor who is now ninety years old. He is an impressive actor and would be tremendous in a better film. His passion, weariness, and sheer age shine out from the screen, but like everything else he's flipped around and is unstable as a character. He seems indomitable and his effort to find the truffles whose sale will pay overdo rent and save him his house seems relentless. But then he appears to give up. Dalia (Ms. Turk, who in real life is South African and Lebanese) arrives, Igor's granddaughter, a young women who has failed as a student and lost her motivation in life, sent from London by her mother, Marta (veteran Italian actress Margherita Buy) to help Igor. Dalia talks to Marta, who works in a London hospital, on her ever-present cellphone.

At first Igor, who has dementia, though it comes and goes, thinks Dalia is a witch, and when he sees Marta on Dalia's cellphone he thinks she is in the room. How Dalia is going to help the old man is uncertain since she remembers hardly any Italian from her youthful visits and Igor knows little English.

In this unpromising situation Birba is a godsend. She saves the day, but not the film, which is full of turbulent and far-fetched events, including the finding, thanks to Birba (and later losing) of an enormous, world-record-sized white truffle, a truffle auction featuring girls in princess costumes, a town fair in period costume with a parade, and all that running around by red-headed Dalia. When the overactive camera follows Dalia into the woods and later over the dales we get a chance to experience the beautiful autumnal countryside of this part of Italy. We also get a sense of weather. Igor's personal theory is that what brings out the truffles is lightning. He has the notebook and diagrams to document this. The arrival of a good thunderstorm seems to mean time to go truffle hunting. Failing physically, Igor persuades Dalia to forage with Birba in his stead, armed - would you believe it? - with her cellphone and his arcane notebook, whose images miraculously coincide.

This is a farrago of nonsense, but it shows us a beautiful place steeped in natural interest and rich Italian history. These surroundings aren't completely lost in the foolishness. Italy is a beautiful place and the silliest movie can't hide that, and moreover at times it's intentionally joking around.

Trufile, 100 mins., opened Oct. 17, 2024 in Italy. It was shown at Palm Springs in Jan. 2025 and Santa Barbara Feb. 2025 and is scheduled for limited US release Nov. 14, 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

ERKIN COç in THE THINGS YOU KILL

ALIREZA KHATAMI: THE THINGS YOU KILL (2025)

Revenge tragedy is a dry puzzler

Starring Hazar Ergüçlü, Ekin Koç, and Erkan Kolçak Köstendil, this strange, some think "Lynchian" film directed by the Iranian filmmaker Alireza Khatami, for political reasons was filmed in Turkey with a local cast. The Things You Kill tells the story of Ali (Ekin Koç), an insecure university teacher with roiling emotions. His course in translation is likely to be cancelled. More than that or more intimately, Ali is shaken by the suspicious death of his ailing mother (Aysen Sümercan), and this leads him to spiral into a deep rage in a film that becomes an exploration of violence and suspicion in a family. In this film much admired at Sundance for its direction, hang on for a strange ride. if you will.

After struggling hard to have a baby, Ali has learned that he has a low sperm count, but he conceals this. He has a falling out with his wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü), who is a vet dealing with cows., but she hangs on. During his grieving process for his mother, Ali's resentment toward his father Hamit (Ercan Kesa) resurfaces, along with an awareness that he was violent toward his mother. Ali forms a friendship with a mysterious man who turns up in his cabin out in the country and becomes his gardener, Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), a lookalike alter ego. Amid questions about rusty pipes and a "collapsed" well Ali must bribe an official in US dollars to replace, Ali devises a cold-blooded plan of revenge against the elder he has reason to believe is responsible for his mother's death. He persuades Reza to carry it out.

Ali's father disappears. He makes repeated trips back to his garden - a desolate place out in the country that reminds me of the Turkish director, Nuri Bilge Ceyla., with whom Ercan Kesal, who plays Hamit, is a regular collaborator. Long-buried family secrets are revealed, a history of violence. There is a magic realist finale.

Successive events come unexpectedly. Ali seems like a thoroughly unpleasant individual, and yet we don't entirely lose our sympathy toward him. He always remains the protagonist. The Things You Kill is an interesting watch that keeps you guessing to the end, though it may never quite gain your confidence.

Reviews for The Things You Kill are generally positive,favoring the film's confident technical craft and psychological depth, though some critics have found the film emotionally cold or overly reliant on stylistic imitation. It's been described as a psychological thriller and a layered, surreal drama about grief, revenge, and the pressures of masculinity and societal expectations. The reason for attributing a "Lynchian" style to Khatami, is its way of shifting between naturalistic drama and surreal, disorienting sequences.

Ali's secrets are very slowly revealed. Only toward the end he describes to a university official bent on making him redundant that he studied comparative literature in the US, doing so as an escape from a youth of being constantly teased and abused in Turkey. A character changes identity. On the other hand, in the latter half the film shifts into thriller mode, evoking James M. Cain or the Coen brothers, though the atmosphere makes that a little too surreal and playful to matter.

The play with reality, the artful framing of images, build confidence in Khatami's craft. But as Jordan Mintzer's Hollywood Reporter review comments, while Khatami "has a lot to say" and this is an "intriguingly deconstructed viewing experience," the film remains "emotionally speaking. . . a bit stale."

The Things You Kill/Öldürdüğün Şeyler, 114 mins., premiered at Sundance Jan. 24, 2025 (Best Director in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition). Also Rotterdam, Hong Kong,. Istanbul, Taipei, and numerous other international festivals. US release Nov. `14, 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

MAX SUEN IN A FEW FEET AWAY

TADEO PESCAÑA CARO: A FEW FEET AWAY (2025)

"Johnny Rio, a handsome narcissist but no longer a pretty boy, travels to Los Angeles, the site of past sexual conquest and remembered youthful radiance, in a frenzied attempt to recreate his younger self. Johnny has ten precious days to draw the "numbers," the men who will confirm his desirability, and with the hungry focus of a man on borrowed time, he stalks the dark balconies of all-night theaters, the hot sands of gay beaches, and shady glens of city parks, attempting to attract shadowy sex-hunters in an obsessive battle against the passing of his youth." A SUMMARY OF JOHN RECHY'S NUMBERS (1967).

Scroll, scroll, scroll, swipe, swipe, swipe. Twenty-year-old attractive Buenos Aires resident Santiago (Max Suen) has a fondness for queer hook-up apps that are bordering on addiction. Day after day, and night after night, ‘Seth’ scrolls and chats away online, hooking up with men as often as possible. The apps capture his full attention, even when the real world around him offers more opportunities for hookups than his phone. He even phones in sick to work to spend more time on the apps and when at work spends time in the office toilets scrolling and swiping. He’s pretty popular online and meets a string of sexy men during the couple of days that we follow him. In real life, however, he’s rather a lone wolf, and not as fluent or confident as he is online, conveying an awkward body language, and he abandons most of his hook-ups abruptly before sex without explanation. To the men he meets, he’s variously a law student or an architecture student, rather than the call center operative he actually is. His best friend and co-worker Karen (Jazmin Carballo) is his close confidante but he exaggerates all the tales of his encounters to her to make them sound more interesting. Things reach a head one weekend evening when partying with Karen and simultaneously hooking up test his strength.

A Few Feet Away is directed by Tadeo Pestana Caro and takes a close look at modern dating culture. The ease of using online apps, their addictive nature, their potential to create an unreal world for the user, the risk of loneliness, the chance of meeting very odd people, the line between fantasy and reality, and the danger of ignoring real world opportunities at the expense of potential online rewards are issues many hook-up app users will be familiar with. Although set in Buenos Aires the themes of the film apply to any city in the world.

Caro has created an energetic, sexy, unpredictable film. The night-time hook-up, club and party scenes are authentic and accompanied by a brilliant soundtrack by Balthazar Olivier and Alejandro Rosenblat who throw a lot into the mix including gems from artists as varied as Maluma, Kim Carnes, Midnight Oil and Gilbert O’Sullivan. No judgement is made and the viewer is left to draw their own conclusions as to Santiago’s behaviour. I personally feel the film could have worked better with an older lead character. Then his behaviour would be easier to analyse. At 20-years-old trolling around endlessly online could be seen as a phase or rite of passage, rather than any kind of cause for concern. At 35-years-old, say, or older, it could be more thought-provoking behaviour. Nevertheless, this is an excellent film that builds slowly to reach its climax.

‘

[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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