The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021): 2/5

Ponderous and lugubrious. Full of scenes of our hero walking through (lovely) landscapes and images—as opposed to grappling with other humans in a meaningful way. Bored. 

Annette (Leos Carax, 2021): 2/5

A couple of arresting sequences but overall, extremely awkward. The songs are sing-songy, tuneless, repetitive and literal. 

Zola (Janicza Bravo, 2021): 3.5/5

Mixes Elmore Leonard’s free-flowing psychos with the style of America Honey, Spring Breakers, and Tangerine, but genre. The acting is good, and the story is not bogged down by (too much) Tarantino-esque irony or exaggeration. Nicholas Braun is a rock star.

Pig (Michael Sarnoski, 2021): 2.5/5

A character study and a portrait on an artist, but highly affected and full of narrative and stylistic cliches. Self-satisfied and cartoony. 

Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage (Garret Price, 2021): 2.5/5

Similar feelings here as with Summer of Soul: the narrative of social significance is over-emphasized and the music under-emphasized. I demand to hear an actual Korn song! Easily the most interesting material is the Limp Biscuit performance fragment, which is legit eloquent and powerful (accidentally)—analogous (in a reduced, 90s sort of way) to the Stones’ performance of Sympathy for the Devil at Altamont in Gimmie Shelter. The artist looking out across the crowd and wondering who is manipulating who.   

The Suicide Squad (James Gunn, 2021): 3/5

I was amused by the bloody humor and the satiric characters for the first half. In the second half the characters are somewhat overwhelmed by scale. Still, not bad.

The Jungle Cruise (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2021): 3/5

Relatively warm and funny for a blockbuster. Good visual storytelling, with no long scenes of exposition—a surprisingly common problem.  

Blow Out, rw (Brian DePalma, 1981): 4/5

I have recently heard a couple of people call it his masterpiece and perhaps they are right. It’s both derivative and highly original. Both gonzo and suspenseful. It’s dumb but I can’t think of a single European director who could have achieved this level of suspenseful execution, while retaining all the sloppiness and sweat. (I limit it to European because Kurosawa) My mom and dad took me to see this movie in the theater in 1981; I was 14. I loved it (more than my parents, since they hated the ending), and I had obviously never seen Blow Up or The Conversation (which are both better and obviously way more high art). 

Irrational Man (Woody Allen, 2015): 3/5

Really good performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone (two of my favorites) in another version of Crime and Punishment (after Crimes and Misdemeanors, of course). Full of event, character arc and actual tension. A swift hour and 33 minutes. 

Men at War (Anthony Mann, 1957): 3.5/5

So minimal and primal, it can’t help but be cliche. The scene where they realize they are standing in a mine field. The scene where the guy in the back of their line disappears, and they have to go back and see what happened. Robert Ryan, Vic Morrow and especially Aldo Ray make it worth watching. Significantly, there are two shell shocked characters (out of 15.) 

10 Rillington Place (Richard Fleischer, 1971): 3.5/5

An almost unbearably ghastly and cold portrait of a meek, English doctor-type murderer. For me, it honed in so exactly on feelings of shame and being found out that I only made it through on the third try. Made by the director of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Soylent Green (as well as Mandingo).  

Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston, 1967): 3/5

Definitely a John Huston movie about being gay in the military. Innocent horses and Elizabeth Taylors are harmed. Brando’s accent makes the beginning rough-going, but eventually he gives us some moments of real emotion and introspection up on that screen. Robert Forester meanwhile runs around naked like he’s in a Jean Genet novel. Brando can’t fuck him, so you know what the only alternative is.  

The Dead (John Huston, 1987): 3/5

The first hour is a tedious dinner party with older relatives that one must indulge (too much like real life for me), but the last 20 minutes is a moving and beautiful meditation on memory, the depthless mystery of relationships, and death. Would it have been as powerful without the first hour? That notorious dumbfuck Joyce seemed to think so.  

Insidious (James Wan, 2010): 2.5/5

Often effective, yet paper thin. No real human conflict grounds what is occurring to the characters. 

Ingmar Bergman Film Fest

Introductory notes:

• I like the way Bergman’s films tend to eschew long, atmospheric passages showing the environment and someone looking into space and perhaps thinking something. Instead, his movies charge right into the personalities of his characters and the conflicts that must be addressed. Oppositions and grudges are articulated and confronted, without delay, which is thrilling (whereas delay and sublimation/symbolism is the lifeblood of action, horror or suspense genres.) 
• Bergman’s not sentimental; I like to cry in movies, but none of these moved me to tears. However, he is interested in emotions, especially the irrational—the contradictions and reversals in our feelings and actions.
• His movies are psychedelic in the sense that their subject is consciousness. They endeavor to help you enter into the thoughts, feelings, memories, fantasies and dreams of others.
• I like that most of these movies are 1:30 or even less. These are lean machines of deep-feeling characters, intense emotions, acute observation of human psychology, and questions about where meaning can be found. Since they are so short, they rarely wallow in any mood too long, and they allow themselves to be untidy—shooting off on unexpected tangents that contrast to the main plot or theme. 
• Bergman obsessive themes: marital infidelity (including what happens when the cuckolded partner confronts the two adulterers directly; he depicted this at least four times, all very different-feeling), unwanted pregnancy, the life/temperament of artists, cold or absent fathers. 
• I just love directors who work with a stock company, and here we have one for the ages: Eva Dahlbeck (6 movies with Bergman), Ingrid Thulin (8), Bibi Andersson (10), Liv Ullmann (11), Max von Sydow (11), Erland Josephson (12)—and my favorites, Harriet Andersson (10) and Gunnar Björnstrand (19).
• I’ve now seen 36 of the man’s works, but he filmed so many plays for Swedish TV that I’m barely past the half-way mark, completist-wise.

Crisis (Ingmar Bergman, 1946): 3/5

Bergman’s directorial debut, a melodrama about the prodigal daughter, off to the big city. Presents the love and suffering of a mother as well as ample country/city contrasts. In case you’re wondering about Bergman’s opinion, people in the city tell her she’s an ‘anchor of reality’ to them. 

Thirst (Ingmar Bergman, 1949): 2.5/5

Infidelity, including a wife confronting the couple. Life of an artist. Unwanted pregnancy. The woman is quarrelsome and restless. A late-term abortion has left her barren and miserable, possibly representing the war-ravaged Europe through which they are traveling by train. The movie proceeds through a series of disjointed flashbacks and even follows tertiary characters for a surprising amount of time (Bergman is always willing to confuse the viewer, but it turns out this was an adaptation of a book of stories). Features a murder and a suicide. 

To Joy (Ingmar Bergman, 1950): 3.5/5

Infidelity. Life of an artist. Unwanted pregnancy. (I’ll stop this but you get the picture). Two young musicians meet, fall in love, have twins, succeed and fail in their careers, argue and reconcile, and live an ordinary happy life. What I haven’t told you is that the first thing we are shown is that the wife dies in a fire when the children are still toddlers, and the story is told after learning this fact. Which demands you keep two opposing emotions in your mind the whole time. 

It Can’t Happen Here (Ingmar Bergman, 1950): 2/5

There are four Bergman films that are universally considered to be his worst— this one, The Touch, All These Women, and The Devil’s Eye—and, boringly, I agree: This is a noirish political thriller, complete with vertical-blinds lighting, murder, car chases and a disappearing corpse. I had some trouble telling the good spies from the bad ones, but perhaps that’s the point.

Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman, 1951): 3/5

A ballet dancer experiences summer love and shocking loss, with a lovely reverie in the second act and an enigmatic third. 

A Lesson in Love (Ingmar Bergman, 1954): 3/5

A straight-up screwball comedy of remarriage. Similarly wry and knowing (slash cynical) regarding love, marriage and affairs as the more successful and funnier Smiles of a Summer Night, the following year. As a matter of fact, both movies have the same actors (Gunnar Bjornstrand and Eva Dahlbeck) as the cheating husband tired of his affair and wishing to return to his wife figure. 

Dreams (Ingmar Bergman, 1955): 3/5

Ironically for Bergman, no actual dreams are depicted in this tale of a couple of days in the life of a fashion photographer and model. The photographer is having an affair, when the man’s wife confronts them in their hotel room, and in one unbroken five-minute shot devastates both of them by correctly guessing their whole previous conversation and psychology regarding their love—their mutual dream if you will. 

Smiles on a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955): 4/5

Wonderfully mean and genuinely funny screwball comedy or about love and sex. Shot through with dreamlike reveries of great beauty and grace. Oh, what fools these mortals be. 

Wild Strawberries, rw (Ingmar Bergman, 1957): 3.5/5

Memory, dream and fantasy are all on board for a trip across the country and through the mind. 

Brink of life (Ingmar Bergman, 1958): 2.5/5

Three women in a maternity ward, three fates, all pretty cruel. Is there unwanted pregnancy? Why yes. Traditionally stage-bound, free from interiority. A throwback to Bergman’s earlier melodramas; not written by the man.

The Magician (Ingmar Bergman, 1958): 3/5

The titular stage artist suffers and hates, mysteriously and theatrically, granting those he encounters permission to do the things they really want to do anyway, while hiding behind a facade of “the Magician made me do it.” I can see how Trump offered this for paranoids and racists. In the end, it’s a debate about science vs the uncanny, the desire to discover the soul through autopsy, the real magic of (fake) actors, and the silence of God (as the Magician pretends to be mute.) 

The Devil’s Eye (Ingmar Bergman, 1960): 2/5

A self-described comedy (although laughless) about Don Juan returning from hell to take a girl’s virginity. Some parody of seduction and love ensues. 

Through a Glass Darkly, rw (Ingmar Bergman, 1961): 5/5

Bergman’s Joan d’Arc. Here Karin is capable of intense, terrifying bouts of ecstatic and sexual madness concerning the imminent presence of God. Harriet Anderson incredibly beautiful and free—expressing great rapture and suffering. God is declared to be a hideous spider, not so much a belief as an experience. 

Winter Light, rw (Ingmar Bergman, 1963): 5/5

Like a couple of my other favorite films, this is a priest in crisis. “I put my faith in an improbable and private image of a god, who loved mankind but me most of all. An ignorant, spoiled and anxious wretch makes a rotten clergyman,” says Father (doubting) Tomas. At least six characters who can no longer experience a feeling of the presence of God, terrifying or otherwise—including a suicide. When people criticize Bergman’s despair and angst, this is certainly the kind of movie they mean. Yet this is more probing than painful. Like Night and Fog (let’s say) it attempts to get down to some brass tacks. An hour and 22 minutes. 

The Silence, rw (Ingmar Bergman, 1963): 4/5

An experiment for the often-logorrheic Bergman, and quite a successful one. This focuses on the stuff you do when you don’t talk (or can’t really communicate). Taking naps, daydreaming, masturbating, reading, getting drunk, dying of tuberculosis, fucking, thinking “You will be dead soon” or “I hope you die soon” not to mention that old chestnut “I will be dead soon.” In their silence, our three characters are even more isolated than usual. Beautiful and sensual. God is not mentioned, but I suppose it’s implied?

A Dream Play (Ingmar Bergman, 1963): 2.5/5

The preface describes it as “a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations. The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble. But one consciousness rules over them all, that of the dreamer.” This is as good a description as any for many of Bergman’s works as well as Lynch’s. Thereafter, numerous characters rhapsodize on the brief joys and prolonged suffering of love, education, vocation, family life, belief in God, with the tone being abstract and ghostly a la Beckett. “Life is strife between the agony of ecstasy and the ecstasy of agony.” The play was written in 1902. According to Wikipedia, “Strindberg wrote it following a near-psychotic episode. During that time, he came to be extremely disturbed, thinking witches were attempting to murder him.”

All these Women (Ingmar Bergman, (1964): 1.5/5

The broadest comedy in Bergman’s career and certainly his worst movie. Filled with airless physical comedy, wacky Dixieland music, Benny Hill-style fast motion and garish soundstage sets. A satire of critics, it also possible his most bitter, which is saying something. Remarkably, this self-described “convincing and well-deserved fiasco” is sandwiched between The Silence and Persona.  

Daniel (Ingmar Bergman, 1967): 2/5

Home footage of the first two years of Bergman’s son

The Rite (Ingmar Bergman, 1969): 3/5

A defense of pretensions theatre as transgressive and punishing to the status quo. Yet it acknowledges that the artists themselves are out-of-control hedonists (but actually really cool in a dark-sunglasses way). Comparatively slight, but experimentally fragmented and only 1:16, so fine. 

The Touch (Ingmar Bergman, 1971): 2/5

Elliott Gould is muted, and his attempts at naturalism produce only a kind of Woody Allen stutter and hesitation. The script has him cycling rapidly and randomly through strong emotions in a way that seems unnatural. Is this the way all of Bergman’s scripts are, and I just never noticed since it’s in Swedish? Bergman uncharacteristically uses a sunny pop instrumental (first literally and then increasingly ironically).

Cries & Whispers, rw (Ingmar Bergman, 1972): 3.5/5

Very much a movie about dying—about being in the same room as your dead sister. So not a great time at the movies. Still, it has a deep gravity and stretches out its lines of inquiry in many directions. Has any other movie had fade-to-red as a motif? Typical of Bergman to casually break all the rules, especially to blast out a feeling of the interiority of the characters. The red is pain, I think, and the interior of the human body with all its feelings, memories and contradictions—in short, consciousness. A person in the same room as you is so present and real and vast, it’s hard to believe they ever cease to be. Making Harriet Anderson—the very embodiment of youth, sex and beauty in Summer with Monica and Smiles of a Summer Night—the one dying here is especially cruel. 

The Magic Flute (Ingmar Bergman, 1975): 2/5

The least psychedelic of his films—a surprisingly straightforward, stage bound, strictly proscenium mise en scene, made for Swedish public television. 

From the life of Marionettes (Ingmar Bergman, 1980): 3.5/5

Now that I’ve seen a dream play it’s much easier to see this, like Cries and Whispers and Persona, as a series of monologues, all coming from the dreamer, Bergman. In C&W, they arise in contemplation of the death of a young person to cancer; in Persona from a more abstract existential crisis. Here they are in reaction to an unexpected murder—and also to compulsive and insatiable sexual desire. Yet as is often the case, these monologues are so sensitive and articulate about what people are like that they put most other movies to shame. As ever, I take great pleasure in the characters (finally) just saying all the terrible things on their mind to one another. It’s a naked lunch, and we finally get to see what is on the end of everyone’s fork. In German.

After the Rehearsal (Ingmar Bergman, 1984): 4.5/5

Such a typical Bergman film, as they all are God bless him. A thinly veiled version of himself (Erland Josephson from Scenes from a Marriage) having a long conversation with a hot young actress that mixes banality, inner thoughts, arguments, memories suddenly walking on stage, revelations, fears, brinksmanship, rapid cycling through emotions, mother issues, father issues, meta commentary on actors acting and directors directing in their real lives. And lines like this that destroy me: “the temperature of a love can only be measured by the loneliness that precedes it.” And the idea that to imagine something and live it in a fantasy is actually more real than to actually do it, since reality is ultimately full of lies and humiliating self-deceptions. And the mysterious power of everyone in a room (whether it be two or a thousand) believing in a piece of shared fantasy, somehow really thinking it true and sharing and having all the emotions. In short, love and/or theatre. All in 1:13. 

Karin’s Face (Ingmar Bergman, 1984): 3/5

Spends 16 short, emotional minutes investigating his mother by looking at her expression and circumstance in a number of photographs over the course of her life.