* Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022): 4/5

No matter how prepared we are for this vision of the future by similar imagery in other Cronenberg works, there is still a steady torrent of shocking and exciting grotesquery, here. It’s a high class (slow and regal Instead of sweaty and feral), remake of Videodrome, complete with belly slots and the need to feed the public’s desire to experience pain and sex (in every variation). 

 

* Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski, 2022): 4/5

Cracking entertainment that succeeds at everything it’s trying to do. 

 

Men (Alex Garland, 2022): 3.5/5

An arty and suspenseful horror movie, with some original images. I floated happily along on the pillow of tension. The end swings (not quite successfully) for Kubrick, by which I mean profound and awe-filled incomprehensibility. Why not! 

 

RRR (S. S. Rajamouli, 2022): 3/5

Histrionic, cartoony and overlong—too much in every way—but if you work to get on its wavelength, it’s a lot of fun. 

 

Dinner in America (Adam Rehmeier, 2022): 3.5/5

The first third is nerve wracking and fun, as we gleefully follow a really wild character, liable to do anything at all. Eventually we settle into a decent ‘lovers on the run’ narrative. After all the stunning nihilism of the beginning, it’s hard for movies like this to figure out what the characters DO care about—here punk rock, skee ball (?!) and of course love.

 

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Jane Schoenbrun, 2022):3.5/5

Creepy and insightful. The style is a bit “social media,” but the whole time you’re kind of wondering how genre vs “real” this movie is going to be (the genre being “supernatural horror”), and I found the resolution to be pretty satisfying.

 

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi, 2022): 1.5/5

Raimi, where art thou?

 

Barry, Season 3 (Alec Berg, Bill Hader, 2022): 3.5/5

Quite a ride. Ironic and dark. 

 

The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021): 3.5/5

Not very consequential or particularly insightful, but entertaining and full of emotion. It says more about me than the movie that I kept saying, “If she would just get a job (or occupation) that made her feel that her life had some value, everything else would fall into place. She will never love another person until she loves herself first.”

 

The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2014): 4.5/5

Inexorably climbs/burrows from the low-level killers of The Act of Killing to the generals, to the politicians at the time, to his own uncle and even mother, all denying knowledge and responsibility, silently letting the past be past and whistling past the graveyard until finally everyone has forgotten. 

 

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (Hideaki Anno, 1997): 2/5

Since it caps a long anime series that I’ve not seen, it was impenetrable in terms of meaning or drama. So, for me, abstract to a surreal level, but very fast. 

 

Little Children (Todd Field, 2006): 3.5/5

A well-told suburban tale, full of flawed people. Winslet is a very sexy Bovary, and Jackie Earle Haley is perfect as the neighborhood sex offender. At least three times better than Revolutionary Road. 

 

Benny’s Video (Michael Haneke, 1992): 3/5

That’s some cold-ass shit. 

 

The Travelling Players (Theo Angelopoulos, 1975): 3.5/5

The story of conflict-torn Greece 1933-1952, told by following a troupe of actors. Largely made up of very long takes, often travelling and often stunning in effect—filled with reveals, reversals and other grace notes. Since it’s about not individuals but groups of people, over time and caught in the waves of history, it bears a resemblance to The Red and the White and Jia Zhangke’s Platform. 

 

Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, 271 mins. (Fritz Lang, 1922): 3/5

Murder, suicide, shoot-outs, car chases, gambling joints, cocaine, disguises, an escape route through the sewer, nightclubs with (actual) topless entertainers, mesmerism, and sets reflecting Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Expressionism and African art. 

 

Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006): 2.5/5

As a didactic argument about the punishing effects of IMF debt on Africa is held in the town’s central courtyard, the camera captures village life in all its art, love, fantasy, child rearing, goat herding, cooking and cleaning. 

 

Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2014): 3/5

After overcoming a significant timing/rhythm difference compared to Western Film Tradition, this settles into a terrifying portrait of what it feels like when a dozen guys with AK-47s ride into town on their motorcycles and begin to apply Islamic law, including public whipping for playing music and stoning. I’m pretty sure it’s realistic, which is amazing. Meanwhile (and almost tangential to the above) a father kills a neighbor over a cattle dispute and is put to death. 

 

The Fontainhas Trilogy, Plus, Film Fest

I love when a trilogy evolves in style/strategy over its movies: Ray’s Apu Trilogy, Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy, Bergman’s God’s Silence Trilogy, Romero’s Dead Trilogy. Here, no matter the style, we are really never asked for sorrow and pity for these people (a la Schindler’s List), because yes they are already filled with dignity for no reason at all. “They toil not. Neither do they spin,” and that’s Jesus, brother (according to Matthew).

 

Ossos (Pedro Costa, 1997): 3.5/5

Things you’ll find in this movie and don’t appear elsewhere in The Fontainhas Trilogy: plot, professional lighting, characters who want something, tracking shots, rooms with doors and glass in the windows, people with jobs, people dancing and listening to music for pleasure. Things you’ll find in this movie and the rest of the trilogy: Vanda, that sickly green paint, lack of non-diegetic music, lots of authentic ambient background noise as if from neighbors with kids, long silences, lethargy, despair, a deep well of empathy for these hopeless people. 

 

In Vanda’s Room (Pedro Costa, 2000): 3.5/5

A peculiar time at the movies but doubtlessly full of defiance, beauty and feeling. These people, who seem to live in a literal garbage dump, spend about a fifth of the running time tidying and straightening up their places, yet certainly this remains the grimiest movie ever made. Some junkies sit hunched over in a dark room, trying for five minutes to untangle a mass of yarn, while far, far, far in the distance someone listens to the song “I’ve Got the Power.”

 

Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006): 4/5

In the waiting room of heaven or hell. Trades in Vanda’s protean volcano of chaotic images for refinement, stillness and grace. Ventura, our heroin-sniffing protagonist stands silently staring off in the wrong direction, like a mournful ghost, glowing inside dead-aired rooms of beautiful chiaroscuro and rich and luminous pops of red and green and pale yellow. And in fact, both ghosts and the walking dead come up explicitly in the text. More theatrical than grungy, with its elegant squares of light on the floor and its Beckett-esque monologues full of nonsenses and ruin.

 

Horse Money (Pedro Costa, 2014): 3.5/5

The setting moves here to the antiseptic rooms and long, deep-focus, shadowy halls of a mental hospital, and the style emphasizes Costa’s surreal tendencies. Ventura from Colossal Youth is getting some help, his hands shaking like leaves. Vitalina appears for a couple of scenes, full of whispers. Later Ventura leaves the hospital and walks though dreamy streets as well as through the abandoned factory where he once worked and has some arguments with his old ghosts. At one point, the song “Alto Cutelo” by Os Tubarões (“Cape Verde’s most famous musical group,” according to Wikipedia) plays in full as non-diagetic music (!!) and we’re presented with a ravishing series of tableau—an insanely aberrant (although welcome) sequence in Costa’s later work. 

 

Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019): 3.5/5

Maximizes silence, stillness and gravity and puts even more emphasis on black black black. Costa uses only the bare minimum of light, shining it on just the small part of the frame that he wants us to see—sometimes reminiscent of an iris in silent cinema. Ventura reappears here, worse for wear and more Beckett than ever, mumbling “I go on," while Vitalina mournfully steps through the events she already related in Horse Money. [Considering how Horse Money and Vitalina Varela relate to one another, I’m going to make the crazy prediction that Costa’s next movie will round out this second trilogy by focusing on Tito Furtato, who shows up in Horse Money briefly as a guy who once stabbed Ventura in the head, necessitating 93 stitches.]

 

 

Apichatpong Weerasethakul Film Fest

 

Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2000): 4/5

A reflection on the relationship between story and storytelling. Someone off-screen says “Tell me a story.” The character starts to and that story is enacted and interrogated by additional narrators, who tell their own back-stories while also continuing to extend and enact the original story according to their own sensibilities—and other psychedelic, dreamlike, and associative narrative strategies. 

 

Tropical Malady, rw (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004): 5/5

Remains for me a singular experience, full of profound beauty and mystery. The first half is like a very relaxed version Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together. The second half is a radical, profound, psychological and psychedelic journey into the heart of love, sexuality and the world. Strong undercurrents of Kenneth Anger and Lynch. 

 

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006): 3/5

A relatively conventional tale of two doctors falling in love in a rural hospital. There’s a half-hearted bifurcation in the middle, when the movie seems to be starting over from a different point of view, but nothing heavy. 

 

Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015): 4/5

Rural surrealism, with dreams and local mythological beings freely interacting and mixing with recognizable 21^st-century reality and normalcy—calmly and naturally and full of empathy and wonder.