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Reviews
The Zone of Interest (2023)
Zone of Interest, AKA how humans dehumanize
Ostensibly a Holocaust drama, this is a film about the lies we tell ourselves daily to live amid the horrors, injustices, or inequalities we are surrounded by and complicit in. Consequently, this is the first film explicitly about *how* the Holocaust happened / was allowed to happen (cf., Schindler's List is about *what* happened, a descriptive movie; The Pianist about the will to survive and live as a stance against the nihilistic core of the Holocaust). But as Glazer himself has said, this is not a film about "what they did" but about "what we do." It's so unnerving because it confronts us with what it takes for us to go about our daily lives while ignoring injustices we may encounter daily, for instance naturalizing the status of a homeless person we pass daily (for whom we could do something) to ignoring the brutal routinized slaughter our country is committing against a people who live next door (and which we may even justify to ourselves and others). This is a film about complicity and the *human* work of distancing and naturalizing (and it is work because it requires constant renewal), all in the service of our ongoing existence. This is where its horror lies, and its ability to communicate it so effectively makes it one of the greatest of films of this new century.
There are exceptions in "The Zone" - characters who refuse this complicity and who act against it, either by leaving or by actively trying to help the victims. But there is no guarantee that any of us would be one of them.
Quicksand (2019)
Exploitative, hollow soap
Gossip Girl meets the Columbine massacre in this problematically exploitative garbage that turns a school shooting into a melodramatic soap about a series of uber-wealthy and just regular wealthy Swedish students with some drugs and parental neglect tossed in. A ridiculous, convoluted love triangle, some fuzzily sketched and never-resolved anti-immigrant politics, and fairly rudimentary teen "coming of age" partying unevenly mixed into a six-episode salad that revolves, interminably, around the question of the main character's complicity in a school shooting. Where The Sinner achieves emotional, moral, and psychological complexity, this piles on cliche after cliche, and amounts to nothing.
Navalny (2022)
Lacks Depth
Putin is a tyrant, but this portrait of his key opponent doesn't focus on Navalny's politics, strategy, or work on mobilizing Russian opposition against Putin. Instead, while well-made, it's a pretty underwhelming investigation into the attempted poisoning of Navalny revealing the comical ineptitude of Russian secret services in carrying out the assassination attempt (contrasted with their brutal effectiveness at beating and arresting protesters).
The film's biggest problem is that its portrait of Navalny - aside from telling us he endured an assassination attempt - is that he's an effective influencer. The film's as shallow as the platitudes Navalny spits out in a key scene in which a director asks him to send a message to his Russian supporters. Navalny pulls cliches like "evil triumphs when good people do nothing," and "never give up." These pithy one liners resonate on TikTok, which we're repeatedly shown the politician has effectively mastered through tight, obsessive editorial control. But the filmmakers are less adept at capturing his vision for a post-Putin Russia, aside from vague promises of "getting rid of corruption" and working with all Russians (which apparently include Nazi supporters). The film shows little interest in these more complex issues, which aren't as immediately exciting as identifying Navalny's inept assassins and which can't be summed up in a glib social media soundbite.
Blonde (2022)
Empty, one-note, 3-hour photo
Despite its aspiring avant garde pretensions, including surreal touches and (sometimes trite) visual stylizations, "Blonde" is a three-hour stitch of sequences of abuse and cruelty heaped on the main character - Andrew Dominik's version of Marilyn Monroe. The goal may have been to deconstruct who Monroe the symbol was versus who Norma Jeane the person was, but the deconstruction is childish, one-note, uninspired, and ultimately boring.
The movie wallows in the abuse (though this isn't to suggest that it deserved its NC-17 rating, because it's all very stylized and at a weird emotional remove from the suffering it inflicts upon Marilyn), so much so that "Blonde" is basically about a body exploited from every angle (including from the inside) as it is leered at, raped, beaten, and emotionally and physically abused to the point of being dangerously close to becoming a parody of itself.
There is little effort here to provide Marilyn with any agency; instead, she's simply a punching bag for everyone she comes into contact with, from her mother to the US president. The movie trades in vignettes rather than a satisfying vision. This is what makes it one-note.
What makes it empty and boring is that there is no attempt here at understanding who she was, how she coped with the trauma she endured, or how she made meaning of her brief life in spite of it. The movie's biggest thesis - that Monroe was a creation, behind which was a vulnerable and intelligent person - is little more than a cliche, and the distance between actors' public personas and inner worlds has been much more effectively explored in movies like "Mulholland Drive."
At one point, Dominik said: "My films are fairly bereft of women and now I'm imagining what it's like to be one." "Blonde" shows us a victim with no agency, whose success and tragedy is contingent on her beauty. It lacks imagination.
Nope (2022)
Self-indulgent, overlong, pointless
The movie's incredibly self-indulgent, some of its scenes stretching interminably, presumably to build atmosphere and suspense, except you'd need an intriguing narrative for that to work. But "Nope" is shockingly pointless; it's not really about anything, which becomes increasingly clear as the movie unfolds. The characters have zero chemistry, despite good performances by actors who do their best with the hyper-stylized, always-stilted, and consequently awkward dialogue.
The build-up is interesting for the first 30 minutes, but after that the movie simply drags; it becomes increasingly boring and, in so doing, irritating. In the last half hour, I found myself desperately hoping it would go somewhere and tie its various ideas together in some compelling way. But no. There's no satisfying payoff because neither the stakes nor the main characters' goals are particularly clear or compelling. As a result, by the end, there's zero motivation to figure out how the puzzle pieces fit together. Instead, it's just a jumble of loose set-pieces strung together by an undisciplined script, which could have benefited from cuts and rewrites. In the end, I'm genuinely surprised by how bad it is.
È stata la mano di Dio (2021)
Self-indulgent, under-sculpted
Sorrentino dabbled in Fellini already with the significantly better "The Great Beauty," but this attempt at his own Amarcord falls painfully flat because it forgets that just because it is based on a true story doesn't automatically make it compelling. In Amarcord, Fellini took his impressionistic memories and sculped them into a singular portrait of 1930s Italy. "The Hand of God" has Naples and Maradona, but you don't get the sense that you're glimpsing into a remarkable world that has gone by. Instead, Sorrentino gives us disjointed scenes, which neither connect thematically in an engaging way nor offer us much else to hold onto as we watch the story. Yes, the film has a couple of the stylistic flourishes Sorrentino is known for, but otherwise it is a disjointed, overbearingly self-indulgent mess that assumes the filmmaker's loose memories of obsession with football, his lovey-dovey parents (with gratingly sentimental kissy whistles they share multiple times with one another), his love of cinema (less interwoven than shoved into the story), and bizarre sub-memories of dabbling with the criminal underworld and having sex for the first time (stolen from Fellini's Casanova) make for good cinema. But good autobiographies, however loose, must exceed their subject, otherwise they're little more than scribblings in a private diary, whose entries may make sense for their author, but not much for anyone else.
C'mon C'mon (2021)
Somewhat Uneven
The real-life interviews with children (conducted in part by Joaquin Phoenix) about their reflections about the planet, life, and what the future will look like are remarkably moving, authentic, and sometimes painfully insightful. They are the best part of the movie. Everything else is for the most part the opposite of that: somewhat forced, over-written, often cliche, sometimes forcibly "profound," and occasionally rambling and unfocused. The movie's heart is in the right place, Phoenix's performance is, unsurprisingly, consistently good, but the fantastic real-life elements only bring out the movie's unevenness.
Black Summer (2019)
Formally tense blend of terror and minimalism
Brilliant series and a superior example of the genre. Terse, light on expository dialogue and melodrama, but high on minimalism and poetry. Towers above similar fare, resembling The Revenant or Cormac McCarthy's The Road set in a zombie post-apocalypse, with genuine insights into characters' psychology. This is not about plot, but about physical momentum and the traumatizing and exhausting experience of basic survival. This is especially true of Season 2 where the austere landscape almost becomes a character in its own right: cold, indifferent, and merciless.
Nuevo orden (2020)
If Haneke made a B movie
Despite the title and in-your-face political overtones, "New Order" doesn't really say anything much about class struggle, conflict, or wealth distribution with any specificity or insight. It just takes the ruthless divide between the haves and the have-nots in Mexico (I totally agree with criticisms that whatever it does try to say is shown from the point of view of the 1%) and uses it as a pretext to showcase expert craft in creating tension and bathing the screen in blood. I know that it seems like it has something political to say, but aside from a kind of undeveloped (and generally cheap) cynicism about the corruption of the ruling elites (kind of undermined by zero development of the oppressed), this is just a taut, expertly directed thriller that happens to be set during a fictional uprising and coup. The sights of Mexico's flag waving occasionally onscreen are part of the exploitation of political symbols for what is ultimately an entertaining, tense B-movie thriller, with stylistic flourishes of Michael Haneke. If you watch it with that in mind, you can admire its craft.
Antebellum (2020)
Yeah...
Frustratingly ridiculous movie that could have totally lived up to its profound opening Faulkner quote about the past still being alive, particularly regarding slavery's legacy in today's structural racism.
Instead, this is a poorly written mess, with an absurd twist that essentially trivializes the horrors of slavery, while completely drawing attention away from how racism operates in today's society via political institutions, economic injustice, and everyday culture. Mining the cultural arena is what made "Get Out" so great.
Anyway, this is a waste of talent and, sadly, opportunity to say something profound about ongoing problems today. It clearly tries to contribute to the broader conversation started by Black Lives Matter, but lacks it analytical depth and narrative sophistication.
Perry Mason: Chapter Four (2020)
Another convoluted mess
Boring, bloated, and cliché, this series just keeps getting worse, not better. The acting is OK, sometimes over-the-top as the cast tries to deliver outdated, forced dialogue that tries to mimic the poetry of noir wit. The money spent on this series is on screen, but not the motivation for greenlighting it. We get an expensive rendering of old LA, but the story just fails to come to life. If this is a pivotal episode in the series, then I don't want to see what comes after.
The King of Staten Island (2020)
Apatow dishes out more Apatow
A middle-class guy living in the suburbs gets into some shenanigans, smoking pot and making dry jokes (a few of which land), and then deals with grief and learns that being an adult means taking responsibility for one's actions. Yawn.
The Vast of Night (2019)
How to appreciate this movie
"The Vast of Night" is a fantastic movie about Twilight Zone type movies. The point isn't the story, which will turn off some viewers, but the carefully constructed and extremely precise atmosphere - a mounting sense of a dread, a hypnotic mystery, a remarkable sense of geography, place, time, and character. "The Vast of Night" is not so much about aliens or small towns, but about the things that we love about great movies about aliens and small towns. Put simply, it beautifully deconstructs the genre.
Not everyone will like it. You have to appreciate the fantastic dialogue - and fantastic stretches of monologue that draw you into the story by sparking your imagination; the performances, both by the two leads, and the ancillary actors, who sell the time period, and the mounting quiet dread building throughout the movie; the cinematography, which not only immerses us in the town of Cayuga, but lays out its geography with innovative precision, particularly through its technically superb tracking shots; and the great audio work, which complements these elements. The direction here is astounding, particularly on such a low budget.
"The Vast of Night" can be appreciated as an exercise in style, an example of peak cinema craft, and deconstruction of a genre that draws out that genre's best elements (and rises above it). This is a movie for movie lovers.
Billions: Beg, Bribe, Bully (2020)
Confused about its focus and allegiances
Terrible episode, completely out of touch with reality, unironically praising unrestrained money grabs and power moves over everything else. The school scene, invoking Darwinist capitalism like it's the 1980s, is repulsive. By the end, you fantasize that the series becomes about Bobby losing all his money and his whole sideshow of employees along with him. What used to be a fun dissection of the ultra-rich and corrupt regulators is now just part of the problem it used to be about.
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019)
A Great Film
"Portrait of a Lady on Fire," for most of its running time, is directorial perfection. It deliberately, concisely, quietly, and creatively unravels its story and builds an atmosphere of illusively frozen time and growing love. The performances, from the two protagonists to the supporting cast of women, do magic in the film's many wordless sequences, where the camera simply settles on faces and observes looks on the richness of which the bulk of the film hinges.
Like "Call Me by Your Name" before it, "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" is after capturing the feeling of falling deeply in love, perhaps for the first time, and so ultimately, despite its formal minimalism, goes after poetry. Indeed, there are stunning visual constructions in the film, including a first kiss involving covered faces; a shot of two faces, one obscured by the other, and we only see both when they glance at one another; a card game portrayed only through the facial reactions of the players; and, of course, a young woman on fire.
"Portrait of a Lady on fire" is also about women carving out a space of freedom of movement, action, and feeling, however temporary, amidst social expectations and constraints imposed by the invisible, but ever-present patriarchy. It is no coincidence that the film takes place on an island, and we only see a handful of male characters with only a handful of lines.
So, spoilers. The film falls short in a few instances where it fails to trust itself and the strength of its own construction. A few of its moments feel contrived, Symbolic with a capital "S" in that they call undue attention to themselves. One involves an abortion sequence, tastefully done, with the pregnant woman lying on a bed next to an infant who comforts her. The juxtaposition between what is happening and the child is too overt, too obvious, and too clearly ironic and contrasting, and so it sticks out in an otherwise carefully managed visual landscape. Indeed, the entire abortion subplot is clearly a metaphoric device here, but one that feels tacked on rather than natural to the story and its mood. There is nothing wrong with it on a rational level - but it simply feels out of place. Moreover, a brilliant sequence of the heroine, Marianne, who jumps out of a boat navigated through a sea by silent men to save her canvasses which have fallen overboard, as not one of the men helps her, communicates in a minute much more than the entire abortion subplot can, and with more subtlety.
The portrait of Heloise with a daughter and a thumb on a book that communicates to Marianne that she never forgot her, like the final shot of Heloise crying to a performance of a Vivaldi piece Marianne once played for her is overkill. The two sequences are saying "Look! What they had was real and it never went away! Look again!" These final scenes are about hammering what the film has so beautifully communicated without obviousness. Again, there is a scene in the film, from which its title is drawn, that so stunningly captures the depth of feeling between these two characters, while communicating it in a poetic image the audience has never seen before, that makes the aforementioned scenes seem cliche and unnecessary. Moments like this deplete oxygen from the otherwise careful construction the director builds here.
These are minor complaints, overall, because this is a great film, whose pleasures are emotional, intellectual, and visual. For most of its running time, it is a stunningly calibrated poem about falling in love.
1917 (2019)
Visually great, but not perfect
"1917" sits somewhere between "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Revenant" story-wise, even if can't match the sheer dramatic ferocity of either of those two films. The first half hour or so is essentially an exercise in perfectly executed tension, but after that the film becomes a bit more uneven. Basically, the movie could've used a few cuts to propel its sometimes slowing story (e.g. scenes in the truck, an encounter with a French woman, etc). While this movie is pitched as a single shot, it actually has a deliberate edit roughly midway through (involving a blackout), and could've used a few more. Still, Deakins's cinematography is stunning and even when the story lags the images we see are quite striking. But ultimately, in its two hours, the movie doesn't generate enough dramatic tension, particularly as it inches towards its ending, which kind of fizzles. The payoff to this cinematic feat is, without any spoilers, unsurprising, familiar, and typical of so many other war films - it's unfortunate that so much work went into the craft of its production but more didn't go into developing the characters and building up the story.
Swallow (2019)
A movie about struggling to get free
As several users point out, "Swallow" is about a woman struggling for control and autonomy in a situation in which she increasingly has less and less of it - or, to put it more accurately, a situation in which she is subject to others' control more and more. So, at the same time, this is a movie about the social control over women, exerted by society.
The control exercised over the main character manifests in different ways. It manifests in the the main character Hunter's husband dismissing her every time she tries to share a thought or idea. It manifests in the husband's parents' constant reminders that they are the source of the lavish lifestyle she enjoys now that she's married their son. It manifests in the oppressive upper class atmosphere, in which she's expected to be perfect, to say little, and to entertain his husband's friends and relatives. It manifests in her husbands outbursts when she makes a mistake and, let's face it, in the way she becomes secondary to the child she has in her belly. Then, increasingly, once they learn of Hunter's swallowing of various objects, it begins to manifest more directly, as Hunter and his parents attempt to control and surveil her behavior inside the house. Finally, control manifests in the trauma that drives her increasingly self-destructive behavior, stemming from an event in the past that also concerns power men have over women.
Not only men try to control Hunter - her husband's mother is particularly terrifying here, communicating how little worth Hunter has without her husband under the guise of being her ally. But that is the point - patriarchy is a system of belief so ingrained that everyone is susceptible here. At the same time, she finds a real ally in a male nurse paid by the family to watch over her, from a war torn country who understands oppression.
But to see "Swallow" as simply a movie about control is to miss its focus, which is on the lengths people will go to for a measure of independence and autonomy. From swallowing various objects to a decision Hunter makes near the end of the film, particularly juxtaposed against her dark back story, "Swallow" is about reclaiming choice. And all of this works, especially as it becomes increasingly twisted, because of Haley Bennett's performance and the austere cinematography.
Hunters (2020)
Amusing, but flawed despite attempts to overcome its pulpiness
Hunters is a mildly violent, occasionally entertaining, and sometimes shockingly maudlin comic book take on good ol' Nazi hunting. The show, with its psychopathic Nazi villains and its heroic cast of Nazi-murdering misfits, aspires to be more than a superhero story, but its depictions of Holocaust brutalities and the philosophical ruminations on bloody vengeance fail to surmount its genre trappings. The brutalities are appropriately brutal, but the philosophical ruminations are hollow, even if their hollowness is obscured by the great performances of the actors who articulate them.
The acting is indeed great, from Al Pacino to Lena Olin, to everyone in between, and the 1970s set pieces are rendered with a generally meticulous faithfulness. If there is one flaw, it is FBI agent Millie Morris, who investigates the Nazi killings propelling the story, and whose appearance (hairdo and clothes) seem anachronistic - as if she belonged to the 2010s and not the 1970s. Jerrika Hinton's performance manages to draw our attention away from this most of the time, but it still sticks out.
As the story unravels, it becomes increasingly more ludicrous, absurd, and unbelievable. I won't spoil the ending here, but let's just say that there is a surprising dramatic reveal near the end and the longer you think about it, the more it flies in the face of all the philosophizing the hunters engage in, undermining its more serious commitments to grappling with real-life Nazi crimes and its ruminations on the morality of vengeance.
Ultimately, Hunters is at its best when it's at its pulpiest: during bursts of anti-Nazi violence.
Boze Cialo (2019)
Provocative, but also manipulative and ultimately flawed
Well-directed and well-acted, but ultimately melodramatic, unconvincing, and morally repugnant, "Boze Cialo" is the story of a criminal, charlatan, and hypocrite who seemingly finds redemption in a small town that is also redeemed by him.
Daniel, a convicted criminal, leaves juvie and through a series of small (and largely selfish) but significant decisions ends up impersonating a priest in a small, grief-stricken Polish town as the town's vicar goes away on sick leave. The movie goes to great pains to show us how Daniel sweeps the townsfolk off their feet with his vim, verve, and youthful energy, his improvised and unorthodox sermons and spiritual reflections. Broken by a tragedy, he guides the residents through physical grief processing, which involves vibrant arm movements and shouting to process the pain and offers them words of wisdom and soothing. The movie has moments of dramatic power, but also of cliche and falseness, its central premise ultimately tending to the melodramatic and unbelievable.
As he settles into the role of town guide, the movie cannot obscure the fact that he fully embraces and is congnizant of the power he wields in the town - power that stems partly from the role of the Catholic church in Poland and the deeply-rooted tradition of deference to it and partly from the profound grief the townsfolk want to escape so badly they'll listen to anyone who will provide solace.
"Boze Cialo" attempts to tell a complex tale of redemption, but ultimately betrays one of exploitation made easy by the hero's hubris, by tradition, and by inconsolable loss. The hero's interventions in the town's life, both to reconcile its residents and to hold certain powerful individuals to account (e.g. the mayor) ring false and hypocritical because it is not clear the hero himself ever fully comes to terms with his own guilt and his crimes. Given the political situation in Poland, with the church loudly supporting the anti-democratic regime in power, the town's embrace of a more modernist priest seems aspirational rather than true, particularly in a small rural town. Particularly problematic is his deliberate involvement in a conflict between the residents with roots so painful and deep that his attempts at resolution come off not only as egotistical (he's only a tourist in the town with no real sense of its trauma) but also morally perverse (he's a criminal himself with no right to a moral high-ground).
In the end, the movie reminds us that escaping one's past is not possible - and it deserves credit for its conclusion, which I won't spoil here. However, while there is no doubt that Daniel's encounters with the various parishioners transform him, their transformation by him is less palatable, as is the account of how both occur. This is a well-made movie about wishful thinking rather than an account of faith.
Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (1956)
Life as Action
"A Man Escaped" presents a moral view of how one can live their life. Nominally, it is the true (and rendered with obsessive attention to detail) story of a French WWII prisoner who escapes a German prison. But this being Bresson, this movie extends beyond its prison-escape genre trappings.
The key is in how the story is told. Bresson shoots in just a handful locations, shuffling between them with a rhythm and pace that resembles the pace of prison life. We come to know the protagonist Fontaine's prison cell intimately well, the prison courtyard, and the prison baths. This is where life of the prisoners unravels and this is all they and we come to know. Fontaine's movement between these spaces is rote - and eventually oppressive. This is the mundanity of life - the stasis which, left undisturbed, will remain. Put differently, these prisoners are at the mercy of a reality imposed upon them and they can either accept it or try to contest it.
A significant part of the movie is dedicated to Fontaine's painstaking labor, sometimes narrated by him, in creatively fashioning tools out of various prison utensils to execute his escape. These are shot with great care and detail. Bresson is signaling that this work is crucial - what we are seeing is Fontaine acting against the reality imposed by him, by making a choice. This is not a grand gesture, but a series of mundane, focused tasks, done with almost religious precision and care and dedication - all toward the greater goal of freedom understood as an escape from the prison, physical or otherwise.
It is these tasks - cutting a shirt into equal pieces with a razor blade to fashion a rope or using a spoon to carve out a hole in a prison door - that give Fontaine's life meaning. Fontaine is not philosophizing here - he is acting. He gives himself completely to these acts.
The last twenty minutes of the film are so intense and shot with such quiet restraint and brilliance that they have to be seen to be believed - the command of cinematic style exhibited here is remarkable. Ultimately, the escape is an existential act - a profound embrace of life in the face of death, through focus and dedication in the face of doubt, enacted through the complete commitment to the minute, mundane, and daily acts of fashioning that escape.
Jojo Rabbit (2019)
Pretending to be about something it fails to grasp
I like Taika Waititi's films, but this is an infantilzation of the holocaust on par with (trigger warning) Life is Beautiful. Like this other film, Jojo Rabbit turns the antisemitism and nazi fanaticism into a light Hollywood fairy tale with enough carefully manicured dark moments to imply that it has something deeper going on, when it really doesn't. The characters are cardboard cutouts, the story is tonally all over the place (missing is the effortless tension of comedy and tragedy present in Hunt for the Wilderpeople), and there are no insights here (we know nazis are bad, antisemitism is irrational). Jojo's transformation as presented here is facile and unbelievable, and the deliberate caricatures are too far removed from their real, historical counterparts to have any sting of the best of mercilessly dark satire.
The movie could have mined the abject absurdity of nazi ideology for humor (The Great Dictator being a classic example along with The Producers), but it's jokes are easy and soft on the audience. They don't match the subject matter and the tension between their cuteness and the movie's darker aspirations never produces anything worthwhile - it doesn't really work for the most part. This is ultimately a kids movie, a stylized fairy tale, and though no one watches this expecting Come and See (1985), its sugary tone is overwhelming and is undone by its more serious pretensions. The movie ultimately cannot communicate, let alone grasp, the weight of the tragedy it chooses as its subject matter, which makes its humor empty rather than resonant.
The Apostle (1997)
Hollow
Beautifully acted by Duvall and select others, but also a morally repugnant, self-indulgent, and unironic take on the dangerous magnetism of violent charisma in organized religion, The Apostle is bloated and overrated. By a mile. This story of a violent, enraged preacher who searches for and finds redemption through very loud prayer and a Protestant work ethic is shot well, but shockingly skin deep.
Like in Duvall's main character, violence and religion are inextricably intertwined; and it's not that the movie doesn't explore the tension - it doesn't even acknowledge it. The preacher commits a crime, flees, and though this is apparently a redemption story, and the hero does indeed preach to a new community, there's no sign that he actually ever experiences any feelings of remorse or guilt for his crime. He simply moves on and does what he does best - move the flock with his singsong church performances. It's almost as if the movie assumes that if you preach, well, then you can get away with it - which would be a striking insight, if the movie had a trace of irony in it, but it's ultimately so terribly serious.
The movie's treatment of religion is also hollow - there's no effort here to mine the spiritual pull of the kind of churchgoing activities depicted here, no characters for the audience to hang on to whose lives are somehow filled by the spectacle of dance, song, and prayer. There are many people in church, but we don't really know any of them, or why they're there or what they get out of it. In the end, the movie requires us to be on its side for it to work - for us to believe that shouting in calibrated singsong rhythm is enough to wash away our mistakes, even if there's nothing behind the words.
Dark Waters (2019)
Deliberately paced, but with a cumulative impact
Dark Waters is akin to Scott Burn's The Report: a true story about a massive scandal that prides itself on a surgical peeling of layers of evidence to get to the terrifying truth. Here, the subject is corporate malfeasance on a major scale and at over two hours, the movie definitely takes its time methodically documenting the investigation the hero conducts, including a montage that involves poring over mountains of evidence for months, then years.
If this sounds boring then, well, it almost is. In real life, holding power to account is often a thankless task that involves serious mental labor of piecing together clues that don't make sense for a very long time - it is mind-numbing, repetitive work that involves paper and legalese.
But at the same time, the film acquires a kind of magnetic pull as the scale of what Mark Ruffalo's character is unraveling begins to shine through its cold and still sheen. While I wish the story had more urgency - more momentum - the few scenes where a character delivers a powerful speech meant to provide that dramatic jolt feel false. Ultimately, Dark Waters is a good movie because for the most part it sticks to its commitment to documenting the burdens of public service as they really are - not grand and dramatic, but thorough, deliberate, and ultimately cumulative. The scenes in which the protagonist encounters and grows to know the residents of the areas most profoundly affected by the polluting Dupont chemical company, some played by the residents themselves, remind us of the human cost so often obscured by legal and bureaucratic language (e.g. "receptacle" stands in for "humans" in one of Dupont's pollution reports).
In the end, Dark Waters is an account of the work corporations do to distance themselves from the human suffering they cause and of managing the excesses of capitalism through research and law.
Motherless Brooklyn (2019)
Like the Two Jakes to Chinatown
I get it, I know what it's trying to do, but it hits the beats of greater films like Chinatown or Touch of Evil or L.A. Confidential without capturing the atmosphere of corruption and evil those films communicate so clearly. Here, the emphasis is on the plot underlying the mystery - but the mystery is never as central in film noir as what it suggests about the world in which the gumshoe operates. There are murders, thugs, double crosses, and twists and even a rich and powerful Alec Baldwin standing in for the much more terrifying John Houston's Noah Cross in Chinatown. But they feel rote - plot points we've seen before in better stories.
The film lacks a sense of urgency and part of that is due to Norton's direction. He's not a great director, the film lacks memorable scenes, and the story feels both crowded and somehow uninvolving at the same time. The performances are fine, I guess, though the main character's Tourette's probably works better on the written page, in the book from which this script is drawn, where it likely served as inventive word play that punctured a typical first person noir narrative (subverting it). I've never read the book, but here it feels incidental - it's not clear how the condition serves the story or the telling of it, except for the main character's photographic memory, which reveals some important plot points. Finally, there's something too literal about departing from the original novel and setting the story in the 1940s. It suggests a naive commitment to genre that movies like Chinatown transcend by playing with noir trappings to say something bigger about the darkness of human nature. Noir is not a time period, but a mood; an orientation.
Dracula (2020)
Skin deep, bloodless re-imagining
This miniseries is more of a commentary on various Dracula adaptations, one that follows the recent pattern of psychoanalyzing mythical characters and giving them readily identifiable explanatory features like guilt, shame, or trauma, than an original take on the lore. It's an attempt to explain Dracula rather than tell his story. The three episodes don't form a whole and they're not very good individually (except for maybe the second one). This is not a critique of playing around with the original and attempting to modernize it - in fact, adaptations should do precisely that to make the tale relevant. Here, however, the reimagining is only skin deep, via casting primarily, and little effort has been done to truly consider what vampires might mean in today's society. It's not particularly sexy, witty, or gruesome. But it does give you a sense of how a vampire eventually comes to see its life - as too long.