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]

Anirban Dutta, Anupama Srinivasan: NOCTURNES (2014)


Release date: Friday, Oct. 18
Directors: Anirban Dutta, Anupama Srinivasan
1 hour 23 minutes

Science and poetry: a short feature about Himalayan moths

Featuring Mansi Mungee, Gendan "Bicki" Marphew and Ramana Athreya (older guy); other two not named. DP Satya Rai RagpauN. Score by Nainita Desai. Socation sound recordist Sukanta Majumdar. Sound design Tom Paul, Shreyank Nanjappa. Department of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change. Gorernment of Arunachal Pradesh, India.

Hollywood Reporter Lovia Gyarkye
In Nocturnes, a new documentary by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, moths prove themselves to be this planet’s most poetic creatures. Their beauty comes mostly from their routines, but they also possess aesthetic charm. They boast striking colors and patterned wings that rival their more popular cousins. They follow the moon, guided by both its phases and its light. At night, the silver glow illuminates their paths as they flit from flower to flower in search of nectar.

The delicate film (which won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft upon its Sundance premiere) takes viewers deep into the forests of the Eastern Himalayas, a lush environment in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh that pulses with a vibrant ecological life. Singing birds, elephants calling and the growl of apex predators become a soundtrack for the researchers toiling away at their project.

There, quantitative ecologist Manis leads an ambitious mission to catalog every type of Himalayan moth. These insects, she tells her co-conspirator Bicki, a young manm[qne 52o o5h34 yount m3n] from the indigenous Bugun [and Shertukpen] communit[ies], can help people better understand the impact of climate change. Moths are not only incredibly diverse (there’s said to be some 160,000 species in the world, compared to 17,500 for butterflies), but they have also survived every age of the planet. Their endurance is at once a paean to their spirits and a well of prescient lessons.

Before information can be gleaned, however, data must be collected. Nocturnes is as much a process film as it is a sensory experience. The doc opens with Manis and Bicki setting up light screens that attract hundreds of moths each night, working quickly and quietly. They envelop themselves within the forest’s evening soundscape, and the noise of their boots shuffling across the grass melds with the whining crickets, howling owls and rustle of animals sheltering in the bushes.

When the moths start to overwhelm the sheet, on which Manis has drawn mini grids, the researchers begin photographing them with a digital camera. Cinematographer Satya Nagpaul uses close-up shots to create gorgeously composed scenes that find the beauty in these misunderstood creatures. A death’s-head hawkmoth bears a pattern resembling a skull. Others spread their wings to reveal circles that look like eyes. Some are a radiant yellow, others a muted gray. These moments are some of the best in Nocturnes because in their detail, Dutta and Srinivasan relay an intimate understanding of this habitat.

Early in Nocturnes, Manis explains that they must take each image precisely because later, they will use them to accurately measure the lengths, width and wingspan of each insect. There is no estimated timeline for this work. Driven by an admirable determination, she and her team plan to reveal the migratory patterns of these beguiling creatures by comparing their sizes, shapes and populations at various elevations. Are the Himalayan moths, partial to cooler weather, ascending up the mountains as temperatures below steadily rise? What are the implications of this movement, since moths support the local ecosystem?

These are just a few of the questions they pose with their experiments. Dutta and Srinivasan don’t set out to furnish answers in their 83-minute feature, which might frustrate those looking for definitive conclusions. There are informative moments in which Manis explains the animals’ habits, talks through her research with colleagues and presents early findings of her study, but they have a strained quality that feels discordant with the relaxed posture of the rest of the film.

Although Nocturnes is concerned with the slow rhythm and sustained dedication required for Mani and Bicki’s labor, its strength primarily comes from how it captures the texture of the forest. Shreyank Nanjappa’s sound design is positively overwhelming as it amplifies the cacophonous music of nature. Glimpses of moths landing on the light sheets are just as arresting as establishing shots of the environment. Unforgettable images include fog creeping across the screen, enveloping the trees, and sightings of other beasts, like elephants.

It’s in transporting viewers into the heart of this jungle, where the moths calibrate the ecosystem, that Nocturnes most its most compelling case for protecting these exquisite creatures and our planet.

[Chris Knipp]

BONG JOON-HO: MICKEY 17 (2025)

Dying as a living

Robert Pattinson tries the gritty sci-fi thing again - hoping to get it better than Claire Denis' somewhat off-kliter 2018 space-travel film High Life, perhaps. He can tick off another on his bucket list of prestigious directors: the Oscar-winning Korean impressario Bong Joon-ho. Parden me if I'm a tad underwhelmed, though, by Mickey 17, or more accurately, worn out by another big production that grows loud and wearying toward the end and overwhelms what might have been a witty and though-provoking tale of life and death and human eploitation the way it appeared on the pages of Eward Ashton's original novel.

The action hinges on the notion of an organic 3D printer like the one used to print a Glock pistol only now so insanely sophisticated it can reprint a whole human being in every detail. What a piece of work is a man.: So why not crank a duplicate? And if one Robert Pattinson charms, why not two on screen at once? Well, that's what happens, though more isn't always more.

Pattinson's role, Mickehy Barnes, is an "expendible," which means he can be used in tests and experiments on a new space colony on an ice planet 4+ years ride away from Earth called Niflheim. Mickey is "expended," but when he dies, he's immediately reprinted to be used again. He gets a little sex now and then, but more often he gets burned up or poisoned or his hand blown off. Actually Mickey's status is complicated. For the terrible abuse he takes, which has experimental value, he's very useful. He's the planet Niflheim colony's sole "expendible." But the organic 3-D printer makes him a superhero.

Time is spent exploring this reprinting process, and the many Mickeys who have led up to #17, glimpsing and describing how it's done - with a separate brick-shaped object that is file to 3-D print Mickey's brain. We learn that this whole process has been outlawed on earth, because duplicating humans simply couldn't be morally justified. In the novel there's a list of failed space colonies, and one is a place that became overrun by odious oligarchs who replicated themselves over and over, as, of course, they would.

And it's not a surprise that there's a sleazy overlord for the planet Niflheim project called Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) with his glossy, unlikable wife Yifa (Toni Collette), who provide comic relief we love to hate, and further demonstrate that, despite the evidence of Bong Joon-ho's $118 produciton budget, this movie isn't meant to be taken dead seriously. Marshall is a two-time failed US senator with links to some fundamentalist religion.

But while a zero-budget sci-fi film like Shane Carruth's 2004 Primer or a mini-budget one like Duncan Jones' 2009 Moon (the latter also touches on the theme of a man of low status exploited in space) can be thought-provoking because we have to use our imaginations, $118 used with skill by a famous Korean director, as it is here, is going to demand all our attention. When we see a landscape full of plausible creatures as in Villeneuve's Dune movies or this one, we tend to stop thinking and just admire. (There is more to admire in Dune, though.) Or we are awed or disgusted or whatever happens when we see the critters that swarm acorss the screen in Mickey 17, which are called "creepers." They are one of those combinations of menacing and cute. Mickety does communicate with them using a translation device. And when he was doen an ice hole, the giant creeper pulled him out and saved him.

Mickey definitely should have read the job description. But hordes were lining up to leave the Earth at this future moment. "Expendable" seemed like the only job that fit Mickey's skills: none. Pattinson gets to have all kinds of fun with this role, which are woven into the film in editor Yang Jin-mo's way.

Pattinson plays Mickey as a goofy American fall guy, and he's adopted a funny high-pitched American voice. But Mickey is also extremely durable, so much so he doesn't always die when he's expected to. Pattinson gets to enact excruciating pain over and over. He also gets to play with, or against, himself when a glitch causes a nnew Mickey printout, Mickey 18, when Mickeuy 17 is sitll alove and wants to stay that way. two Mickeys on screen. But whatever happens, he's going to die. And not be reprinted forever, presumably.

Part of the enjoyment of this impressive-looking film comes from all its expensive procuction values, or its CGI. That field full of "creepers" lingers in the mind. So does Mark Ruffalo's sleek, odious unctuousness. Pattinson almost vanishes into his durable fall guy role, except there still is that face, which is why he needs to have a girlfriend, whom he gets in the comely Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who for some reasons falls for him. People keep asking Mickey what it feels like to die, but all he can say is he really hates it. We get that.

Mickey 17, 137 mins., debuted in London Feb. 13, 2025, showing at the Berlinale Feb. 15. It opened theatrically in many countries including the US Mar. 7, 2025. Screened for this review at Kabuki Cinemas, San Francisco, Mar. 9, 2025. Metacritic rating: 73%.

[Chris Knipp]

TRUMP AND ORBÁN AT THE WHITE HOUSE

CONNIE FIELD: DEMOCRACY NOIR (2024)

Hungary's dictatorial Viktor Orban regune, a favorite of Donald Trump and thus a story with ominious implications for us

From a chance encounter a decade ago in Budapest's Freedom Square, the American director Connie Field has approached Hungary's political reality with an eye on her own country. Víktor Orbán, the current prime minister who has been in power uninterruptedly since 2010, with a previous mandate between 1998 and 2002, has openly shown his good relations with the American extreme right and his close relationship with Donald Trump, on the one hand, and Vladimir Putin on the other, with an open desire to bond all three more closely together.

Three independent Hungarian women are heard from here as narrators of events. First, Timea Szabò, member of parliament from Budapest region - government media TV announced her campaign was being funded by the "Cocaine business" and then that she was CIA sponsored and a spy. Second is Niko Antal, an activist nurse who reports here ths stark decline in medical serives under Orbán. Third is Babette Oroszi, a TV news reporter and journalist who reports how the media were crippled by Orbán to maintain his dictatorship by flooding the airwaves with propaganda. These brave women are fighting to expose the corruption and incremental destruction of democracy in Viktor Orbán’s regime, a white nationalist regime that is the envy of authoritarian movements around the world, and admired also by Donald Trump, the crypto-fascist now for a second time elected US president.

We learn of the huge Stadium built with government funds for Orbán's best friend whom he has turned into an oligarch, using stones provided for by Orbán's own father, but most of the film is not like processes like this. The main focus is rather on the manipultion of control and the vote.

Opponents repeatedly refer to the ruling politicians as "stealing" from the couhtry and the people. Orbán has changed the constitution to make the country no longer democratic, crush independent media, and cover up his government's corrupt financial practices. The picture can make American viewers cringe. We have been seeing US media drift away from diversity for years, starting with the gradual vanishing of newspapers in favor of a few large consoladated media organs. The US right wing sees Hungary's government as their brothers and the two conservative parties, as we see in the film, travel back and forth and embrace each other at conferences.

Orbán's party, Fidesz – the Hungarian Civic Alliance - is a right-wing populist and national-conservative political party in Hungary led by him. It opehly idetifies itself as illiberal and anti-woke, the latter a term used also increasingly by the ultra conservative movement in the US. It plays to people's right wing tendencies, especially their fear of minorities, homosexuality and LGBT people in general.

We see a contradictory situation: a country subjected to autocracy that is not only part of the liberral democratic European Union, but the largest recipient of EU funds, now main resource used to develop Hungary's illiberal populist policies. While most of the film takes place in Budapest, there is a look also at the rural areas that have become Viktor Orbán's readiest source of support throughout his various terms in office. The absence of a consistent opposition campaign outside the capital has played a role in his continued dominance.

In Field's film, we visit the locals who think Fidesz is great because it brought "order" and "peace". We meet those who believed blocking immigration was great because it "protected" them from foreign invasion. We see hints of Trump's playbook here.

In the 2022 elections, there was hope of achieving a good result thanks to the young politician Péter Márki-Zay, elected by the opposition. But government-controlled media waged an intense smear campaign in which also Timea Szabó was accused of being a CIA spy. It is difficult if not impossible to win as an opposition candidate when there is no variety of opinion in the media.

A coalition of all the opposition parties was able to push out the Orbán-ally mayor of Budapest, and they planned to win control of mayors of the other towns. It would have been nice to see a follow-up on this in the film.

There are recurrant scenes of meetings of the European Union, where Orbán is crtiticized as violating all their rules, electing candidates by gerrymandering and cheating on votes, running the country in a blatantly, boldly illiberal manner. It is shown that Orbán's party bought rural votes of the poor with gifts. A bag of potatoes is enough to win a vote, and vast government funds were allocated to bribe rural voters in just this way. The ruling Fidesz party, having access to unlimited amounts of public funds, could vastly out-spend the opposition.

A depressing but enlightening film.

Throughout her career Connie Field has analyzed different historical events related to politics. She was nominated for an Oscar for her documentary Freedom on my mind (Connie Field, Marilyn Mulford, 1994) a chronicle of the voting registration for women in Mississippi in the sixties. In her acclaimed series of seven feature films Have you heard from Johannesburg (2010), she reflected on the struggle of three generations to end apartheid in South Africa.

Democracy Noir, 92 mins, debuted Mar. 16, 2024 at CPHDOX (Denmark), also showing at SHeffield and Mill Valley and enjoying a French TV release Jul. 2, 2024. Connie Filed has a Metacritic score average of 83% for her other work. Democracy Noir starts at the Roxie Theater, San Francisco, Mar. 12, 2025 with Academy Award-nominated director Connie Field in person after the Mar. 12, 6:30pm show.

[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]

ALEX BRAVERMAN: THANK YOU VERY MUCH (2023).

Sources of the complex, off-putting, briliant and cruel comedy of Andy, who died at 35 but is a legend

A Hollywood Reporter review by Daniel Feinman says it "errs on the side of over-explanation." Variety's review simply says the film not only "chronicles" Andy Kaufman but "understands" him. This is another convetional talking heads + clips monograph, informative but disappointing for someone so unusual and mold-breaking. It does however adequately lay out the basics of his iunique life and work as the most provocative conceptual artist of our time, who posed as a comedian and was a mystery to everyone. Andy Kaufman was a unique figure, and this documentary is a valuable introduction to his life and work.

Danny DeVito, Steve Martin, Marilu Henner, Bob Zmuda, Lynne Margulies, James L. Brooks, and Laurie Anderson are among the talking heads who recall their association with Kaufman. But they acknowledge that they did not know who the "real" Andy Kaufman was.

Thank You Very Much - the phrase, explained here, was a trademark of his comic persona - is a film that traces the life and career of the legendary performance artist. It seeks a nuanced understanding of what drove this mercurial performer, whose gonzo, boundary-shattering comedy provoked and often outraged audiences. It includes rare, never before seen footage and audio recordings that sheds some new light on his creative process. It includes newly uncovered archival footage as well as some intimate recollections of friends, colleagues, and family members. There are interviews with Kaufman’s closest collaborators. It's worth seeing this film to get a broad introduction to the brief life and memorable career of a comedy iconoclast whose impact is felt all the more today with the blurring of lines between artifice and reality that more and more marks our present age.

If comedy comes out of pain, Andy Kaufman's, it emerges here, was the sudden unexplained disappearance of his beloved grandfather, the dearest person in his life as a little boy who died, but they were afraid to tell him and said he was away traveling, leaving him feeling forefver hurt and dangling. His parehts traumatized him. But he still had a grandmother who he loved and brought and danced with on a talk show. His grandmother had taken him to professional wrestling that people back then throught was real: his first experience of show business as a masking of reality.

It is a revelation to hear Bijan Kimiachi, an Iranian immigrant who was Andy's roommate at the now defunct Grahm Junior College in Boston, who was like him studying television production (though he says here Andy was studying television performance). Kimiachi speaks with a marked accent - he says he had trouble speaking to people then - and also that he was probably Andy's only friend at that time. By the roommates' common consent, Andy adopted Bijan's accent (and perhaps his voice as well), as an essential element in a unique comic persona.

On the popular TV show Taxi (1978-1983), Andy became a lovable hit as the forigner guy, Latka Gravas, who talked in a made-up language, using a voice based on his former roommate's.

After he had been on Taxi amd Satirday Night Live, for a while Andy took a regular job as a bus boy in a fast food restaurant in Hollywood. To work. To observe people. The doc makes clear that Andy was always experimenting with reality, testing it: he was never "off," always "on." Friends once found him on the street panhandling. He staged fights in a car with his girlfriend to scare other drivers, played a rude buyer in a supermarket. Life was theater for him.

He persuaded Robin Williams (seen speaking about this in an archival clip) to play his "grandmother" in a mask on the side of the stage throughtout his 1979 Carnegie Hall performance. While he "abused people," as Robin Williams describes it, obviously revealing a mixture of admiration and disapproval. For everyone, there seems to have been an element in Andy that they did not understand: his humor had an edge like no one else's, crossed boundaries. It disconcerted, it disoriented people. This was the seventies and early eighties: he was ahead of his time, a trail-blazer.

He was also a lifelong meditator and even a teacher of Transcendal Meditation, and meditated three hours a day, but made fun of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, TM's founder and guiding sprit. Eventually his involvement with wrestling, which they found embarassing, led the TM community to disassociate from him. (A friend here questions what that could possibly mean - i.e, how does meditation, which happens silently in a room, "disassociate" from anyone?)

He disliked the limitation of one character - his dominant association with Latka in Taxi in particular. He wanted to range out and freely explore many other characters. Notably this included Tony Clifton, a made-up "star" at Harrah's Club who was a Yin and Yang opposite to the sweet foreigner he had first created with Latka. Tony was, in contrast, a rude, macho sort of American (Italian American?) lounge entertainer who was a total asshole. And he insisted on having that character appear on Taxi, and in doing so he disrupted the show and caused the cast to threaten to bring their lawyers.

Multimedia performance pioneer Laurie Anderson, another talking hread here, became friends with Andy around 1978 and played his "straight man" (her terrm) on acts. She would challenge him and then he would wrestle her. This brings up the recurrant subject here of his misogyny. Was it a put-on, or was it real? This was never quite clear. He found various means of provocation. He loved involving himself in wrestling with women, and became known and notorious for that (not as a comedy act but a thing in itself), and notorious also for that apparent misogyny - the more dramatically, since this came at the time when the women's movement was surging.

Sadly, Andy developed a rapacious form of lung cancer, and was taken from us rather suddenly at thirty-five. But as we all know, short-lived artists who are famous can often become legends. And so, as we learn here, Andy Kaufman now is one of the legendfary comic artists of late twentieth-century America. This premature demise became an integral part of his whole life being theater; he made it so. Toward the end of his life, Andy explicitly stated that he wanted his life to be remembered as being one long performance. It is a grostesque variation on the Italian notion of "la vita come opera d'arte," one's own life considered as a work of art.

I didn't like him. (His humor seemed too arch, dialed up to too high a pitch, and thus, not really funny.). But what does that matter? He did not want to be liked. He actively sought to make people think his comedy wa terible. He was, it becomes clear from this important and overdo documentary, always more a performance artist than a comedian. He sought to provoke, to shock, to stun, to confuse. And in doing these things, he made a lasting mark. And the way this strategy ultimately worked was that by the end of his life everything about him had come to seem a put-on. He had in fact discussed the idea of faking deaths over and over, as we har clips to show. So when he died, the public thought it was faked to tease them. And so he won. This looks like one of the first must-see documentaries of the year.

Thank You Very Much, 99 mins., Debuted at Venice, Sept. 2023, chosen as Best Documentary there. The US theatrical release is Mar. 28, 2025. Produced by Josh Safdie.

[Chris Knipp]

HEINY SROUR: LEILA AND THE WOLVES (1984) AND THE HOUR OF LIBERATION HAS ARRIVED (1974)

Arab women in war, and the Gulf struggle, two remarkable films

Ten years after Heiny Srour made history at Cannes with her debut The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, which made her the first Arab woman to direct a movie shown at the festival, she released this film about Arab women warriors both visible and behind the scene in history throughout the past half century both in Palestine and in Lebanon. This is a wide-ranging history of Arab women fighting against British and Zionist colonialism, but also against male chauvinism.

For the film's fortiety anniversary, the restoration will be shown in the US by BAM along with Srour's first film and she will be present for the debut. Thanks to distributor Several Futures. Srour, who is based in Paris, will be in attendance for the week-long run at BAM Cinemas.

It was filmed in often treacherous areas and the filming lasted seven years.In the film, the protagonist Leila (Nabila Zeitouni), a modern Lebanese woman living in London, who visits a photo exhibit, subsequently time-travels through the 1900s to the 1980s, with each trip focusing on the centrality of women in Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements, sometimes overtly fighting in combat with men, often helping behind the scenes.

The ingenuity and complexity of this film are mind-boggling, though the overall effect ultimately is wearying and confusing. A detailed historical knowledge of Palestine and Lebanon might be helpful. Some staged sequences may refer to specific conflicts but there are no voiceovers or titles to inform us of that. A lot is wasted because the editing doesn't relate large sequences in a clear or dramatic way. It's hard to enjoy a film when you're lost.

It's notable that the film constantly interweaves its own staged sequences with actual period clips, sometimes seamlessly, often not. It's jarring, and seems somehow sacriligious, to realize that one clip shows someone pretending to die and the next shows someone really dying.

The best staged sequences are ironic ones where women make use of their traditional roles where both Arab and western men write them off as just mindless housewives who spend all day chopping vegetables or doing the laundry, which, it's pointed out, they're sentenced to by male-dominated Arab society. And then a whole group of women pretending to be on their way to a traditional wedding, singing and wailing and parading bundles of stuff right by enemy guards, are actually carrying weapons and bullets. They insert long bullets into lumps of pastry. All this would be pretty risky. But aren't the endmy guards kind of dumb not to stop them and search their bundles? Yet so it has happened.

A recurrent image is a shot of ten women all covered in black burqas ranged around on a beach. The film keeps coming back to them. Finally a group of men run down to swim in bathing suits, and after they come out of the water, the women pull some of the cloth away from their faces and get up and pull up their dresses and walk into the waterk, gingerly enjoying a dip, showing a lot of pretty white leg.

All this is in Lebanese Arabic, and there are oddly charming scenes of posh traditional Lebanese interiors with huge matching sets of furniture that are almost more dramatic than the actors sitting there sipping tea and coffee.

Also available in a restored print now is Srour's 1974 film, L'Heure de la libération est arrivée/The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, which debuted at Cannes Critics' Week that year. Providing initial background, at first this just looks like a dull educational film, but then it quickly morphs into a work of vivid and riveting reportage. This is an even more extraordinary film for its intimate direct footage of young revolutionaries of all ages and both sexes in the Gulf. Young boys are seen acquiring literacy out of doors, and teenage boys tilling the soil wearing long rifles strung across their backs. Srour is there among them, and there are young women soldiers just like the men, with sparkling eyes, who otherwise might have been squatting in robes cooking and making tea and instead are firing rockets.

Srour is covering the war of national liberation of the people of Dhofar and Oman under the leadership of PFLOAG, the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Arabicn Gulf. PRLOAG, organized in 1968, was a Marxist-Leninist organization that sought to establish a "democratic people's republic" in Oman and expel British forces. Sometimes the fervor is thrilling, and sometimes it is rather chilling. This film as a real-world tract on revolt is almost on a par with Gino Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers. Srour's courage and committment in making such a film are awesome. This one, unlike the Lebanese Arabic Leila and the Wolves, is in modern standard Arabic.

Certainly for all that Leila's occasional longeurs and lack of historical guidelines may somewhat limit accesibility to the general audience, it's a fasciating artifact for students of modern Arab and Lebanese history and Arabic film, and Hour of Liberation is remarkable coverage of the early revolutionary movement in the Gulf. There is remarkable filmmaking here, and these two films can be an inspiration to women filmmakers. With both of them, Heiny Srour established herself as an icon of Middle Eastern feminist cinema.

Leila and the Wolves ليلى و الذئاب ("Layla wa-adh-dhiyab), 93 mins., debuted at Manheim 1984 (Grand Prix) with six other festival awards. Restored 2024 by CNC from its 16mm film original preserved by BFI, it was screened as the closing night of the Open City Documentary Festival in London on its fortieth anniversary in 2024. With clear, new, explanatory English subtitles. See IndieWire. The film premieres Mar. 14 at BAM Cinemas, followed by a rollout of screenings in select U.S. and Canadian cities including Toronto's TIFF Theatre on Apr. 5, Spacy in Dallas on Apr. 7, Vancouver's Cinematheque on Apr. 11, 13, and 26, and the Cleveland Institute of Art on May 4. L'Heure de la libération est arrivée ساعة التحرير دقت, 62 mins., debuted in France Nov. 6, 1974, and was rereleased there Apr. 6l, 2016, and shown at Film Forum, New York Jun. 3, 2029.

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SROUR TODAY

[Chris Knipp]

JAMES MANGOLD: A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (2024)

There is an interview with Tmothée Chalamet by Zane Lowe where the actor speaks volubly about his remarkable, deeply committed six-year.process of preparing for and performing his role as Bob Dylan. Timmy knew nothing about Dylan when he started out. He is playing partly for his generation to show them this time and these artists and make them want to know more. They must also please my generation, who grew up with Bob Dylan and make demands. Maybe we were even in the West Village and listened to folk singers in the Sixties. For both groups, you can't have a letter-perfect, mechanically constructed recreatiion. It needs to feel lived and fresh. It needs to find a middle ground. It's important that the actors play the instruments and perform the songs live, no lip-synching. They have to feel it and live it. When you hear how Timmy drove a truck by himself to Minnesota and revisited Hibbing and Minneapolis and the places Bobby Zimmerman came from, it starts to feel like he had the right approach, even regardless of how the movie may have turned out.

[Chris Knipp]

LUCA GUADAGNINIO: CHALLENGERS (2024)


MIKE FAIST, ZENDAYA, JOSH O'CONNOR IN CHALLENGERS

Can't we just be friends?

Fundamentally Challengers qualifies as a sports movie, one centered on the game of tennis and developed in a triangular love and a three-way rivalry ending in a climactic game when everything is decided. But because it's Luca Guadagnino "back in form," it's exciting, different, and a bit of a tough watch. It may work better on the third viewing - unless you're highlyl adept at following and decoding sudden, scrambled flashbacks, because it's made up almost entirely of a network of them. Music is something this director is especially good at and attentive to, as showed very much in HBO's "We Are Who We Are." Here there is a heavy overlay of songs and blasts of loud techno music. The latter stands for two kinds of high energy, of sexual excitement or the thrill off a pro tennis match. For the sake of the movie they may be inseparable: tennis is sex, and being great at tennis is super-sexy. Sometimes the staccato dialogue is almost drowned out by the tunes, just the way sometimes in a tennis match you may not see where the ball went or what kind of shot gained the point.

There are three actors who go through their paces, and they are in championship form in both senses: they are only pretending to be tennis pros, but they are lean and fit enough to be that, and they inhabit their roles seamlessly and intensely. Though also at times with a light touch.

It begins with a big match at the New Rochelle Tennis Club in the present time between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor). Art is a multiple grand slam whose career has declined, and this low level tournament is an attempt to relaunch him. Patrick has never done that well but he is hoping to take off from here. Most of the action comes through multiple flashback points, until the closing scene of the match when it's allowed to ride through to its rather strange end. Something decisive, if indefinable, happens in that match. But Challengers doesn't imply that winning or losing one match can dchange everything. Or does it? See what you think.

We encounter Patrick and Art as teenagers, promising tennis players and best friends. They've won an important doubles match together. (The two actors look madly young in this sequence.) The way they run around together is comical and fun, and that mood helps lighten later, more serious moments. Now they are watching Tashi (Zendaya) play, and they're in awe. They seem to want to possess her, though they have no right to.

They're more than doubles partners, boarding school roommates, and best friends. They're joined at the hip; they're like brothers, almost twins - perhaps more than that. For indefinable complex reasons, together they dive for Tashi, flirt with her, try to get her number. She knows who they are and refuses, saying she doesn't want to be "a home wrecker" (though they deny that their relationship is like that). These passages are the freshest in the film and seem where Guadagnino is most at home, with the boyishness and sexual confusion. Do Patrick and Art want Tashi or just want to play like her? Or make out with her together, which is more or less what happens?

Whatever happens thereafter, the answer to the question above is emphatically No. They can be rivals, lovers, enemies, but never friends.

Bear in mind that what follows isn't presented chronologically, but in intense flashes we have to reassemble in our minds. In sequences that follow, just when Tashi is peaking, she has a terrible (unspecified) knee injury. She tries to keep playing but her chance at being top seeded is gone, and she gets involved with, then married to, Art, and gives up playing for coaching him. But she also has an affair with Patrick. She and art have a kid, whose creation and care are barely touched on. Not a total tennis orphan, because there is a grandmother. This isn't about that - or much about anything but music, tennis, and these three people.

In several scenes just prior to the final court battle we find that Patrick no longer even has a working credit card and winds up having to sleep in his car in the New Rochelle Tennis Club parking lot prior to the match. He has never done as well as Art has done working with Tashi and now is unshaven, scruffy, sleepy, and hungry. You won't remember Prince Charles or any kind of English accent whether royal, expat, or Yorkshire. O'Connor's character is a loser but the actor is at the top of his game. He has a kind of greasy sheen here that may be the most memorable character of the three, though as Tashi Zendaya radiates a hard, lean sexiness that cuts like a knife, and as Art, Faist's physicality is commanding. Guadagnino, who excels at the sensual, here triumphantly adds that element to the athletic.

The rapid time shifts and the the loud techno keep you on your toes, and evoke the continually renewed adrenalin rush of a professional tennis match. The overwhelm we may feel parallels lives with big choices dominated by the external force of a competitive sport. The individualism and intensely competitive mood of tennis as a aport - one might say narcissism and killer instinct - are essential here. At the same time, Challengersisn't about tennis so much as about the confused allegiances and rivalries that dominate these tennis-obsessed lives. An early scene where Art and Patrick are finally in a bedroom together with Tashi has an emblematic shot where she sits at the bottom of the bed with them on either side of her. She draws them toward her and kisses them, but then she draws them toward each other to kiss each other. But they can't share her, and Patrick is excluded. Everything gets messay after that, but Guadagnino and his writer Justin Kuritzkesm who also penned his upcoming historical film Queer, pesent the mess neatly, in capsules, like the order of a tennis game. But there is a John McEnroe moment from Patrick here, and we see a record number of rackets thrown and smashed.

Everything about the tennis play in Challengers is fudged a bit, most of all the end of the final match, which goes a tad too slow and uses a smidgen too much slo-mo, though as usual in tennis dramas, the principals must look convincing on the court and in the gear and learned how to serve. As things progress, the tennis becomes more and more turbulent and abstract; at the end the camera appears to be almost attached to the balls. O'Connor and Faist and Zendaya don't have to actually play professional-quality tennis, of course, and the matches are a little twisted and abstract.

At the end, the question is which of the two men will win this final, present-time match. Will it really matter? Tennis isn't great because of who wins. The fun will be putting the pieces of this movie back together. Powerful, wildly energetic material to work with, thanks to the actors, to the director, to the score composers duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and thanks to the dpSayombhu Mukdeeprom.

Challengers, 131 mins., debuted in many countries April 18, 2024 and thereafter. Watched for this review at Century Hilltop April 26. Metacritic rating: 83%.

[Chris Knipp]

ADAM ELLIOT: MEMOIR OF A SNAIL (2024)

TRAILER

Downbeat top cast Aussie stop-motion tale with final uplift is one of the year's best animated films

With its beautiful stop-motion, lovely score, and all-star cast, the Australian Memoir of a Snail, the product of eight years of work from Adam Elliot from Madman Entertainment is a leading contender for this year's animated film Oscar. But its peculiar, downbeat plot means something more cheerful, like Chris Sanders' hand-painted look CGI film for Universal The Wild Robot , Kelsey Mann's photo realist CGI film for Disney Inside Out 2, Gintz Zilbalodis' handpainted look CGI film for UFO Flow — or Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham's Stop-motion Netflix film Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl — all may be more likely candidates. (See Gold Derby for more details of the contenders.)

However, the voice acting is flavorful and strong, and others may take the unhappy circumstances and emotional honesty as useful life lessons, as the numerous favorable reviews show; it's a Variety Critic's Pick.

Sarah Snook, who plays the key role of Shiv Roy in "Succession," is the narrator and main character Gracie Pudel, who at the outset is telling her life story to her favorite pet snail, Sylvia. Things began with hardship. She and her twin brother Gilbert (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee as a grownup) are born to a mother who dies in childbirth. Their father has been in an accident that has made him paraplegic, and he becomes an alcoholic and doesn't live very long. When he dies, the twins are sent to different foster homes - in separate states with a big desert between them.

Neither of them gets lucky with their foster parents, either. Gracie is in the care of negligent swingers, who can't be bothered with kids. She becomes a passionate reader and a lonely collector of snails. Gilbert's "shell" is a family of maniac fundamentalist Christians who look down on him and work him hard for derisory wages. The twins go along this way for years, both deeply longing to be reunited and living for the letters they exchange, which we hear. Brian Tallerico of Ebert.com calls this one of the most thematically rich films of the year and notes that it's sophisticated enough to drop referencde to Sylvia Plath, Lord of the Flies, and Cahiers du Cinema. He sees possible inspiration for the film's animated world in that of the Jeunet brothers, and the cast does include Dominique Pinon, of the Jeunet's Delicatessen. Tellerico notes also that there is an exceptional amount of nudity. - this ain't for kiddies and probably not for depressed adults either - but forgets to mention that the people in this film are all of the stubby, animated-film type, so there is nothing very sexy about them. Any beauty here is that of evoked love and devotion, beauty of feeling. Perhaps the hardship is necessary for those qualities to shine forth the more movingly. And there is (spoiler alert) a sweet happy ending.

Peter Debruge in his Variety review compares both the dark and "surprisingly moving" storytelling and the "nearly monochromatic" palette to similar qualities in Edward Gorey. Actually the color of the images is very pleasing. The way characters usually face the camera head-on "as if posing for gloomy school photos" he compares to the style of Wes Anderson. The irreverent humor encompassing weird sexual kinks (a husband who turns out to be fattening his wife with milkshakes and microwave sausages because he's an adipophile (fat fetisher); a kinky judge who gets disbarred for masturbating in court, reminds him of John Waters.

All these links and possible influences don't meant that Adam Elliot's film isn't original. Though the stubby figures have similarities to plenty of other animations, unfortunately, the story is pretty unique, and that is most welcome in a world that, for all the freedom animation has to create its own environments, is often much of a sameness.

Just when things are seeming too much for Gracie, she finds a husband, Ken, whom she thinks perfedct. He operates a leaf blower but his hobby is kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with ornamental seals. Later, she encounters a gnarly crone of wonderful spirit with amazing life stories called Pinky (voiced by the great Jacki Weaver, Australian actor royalty, who cares for her, till later she sinks into dementia and is cared for by Gracie. As you can see, a lot of stuff happens in this little film, and we haven't told you the half of it.

The very pretty score is by Elena Kats-Chernin. Other notables in the voice cast list include Nick Cave and Eric Bana; and six members of the Adams family are heard from.

For animation fans who like to keep up on the best new films, this is a must-see. Elliot won an Oscar earlier for his animated short Harvie Krumpet.

Memoir of a Snail, 93 mins., debuted at Annecy Jun. 10, 2024, winning the Crystal Prize for best feature, showing also at Melbourne, Telluride, BFI, São Paulo, and Mannheim-Heidelberg. Limited US release by IFC Oct. 25, 2024. Metacritic rating: 81%.