Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
Close Your Eyes (2023)
Victor Erice made a stone classic of Spanish cinema with “The Spirit of the Beehive” back in 1973 but in the intervening decades has made only one other feature film and one documentary, until now. After a gap of 31 years “Close Your Eyes” delighted the Cannes Film Festival with the demonstration of a master at work, telling a sad and complicated story with patience and respect, as well as plenty of nuns. The trouble is that this movie has so clearly been fretted and fussed over that it has lost the freshness and spontaneity the best cinema hopes to capture. This sense of being over-rehearsed is perhaps understandable, but unfortunate, as it prevents this good movie from being a truly great one.
Continue reading “Disappearing Act” »
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
Kubi (2023)
The opening shot of the film is of crabs crawling out of a corpse’s spinal cavity, from the space where a head normally rests on a neck. And if you think that’s gory you ain’t seen nothing. Writer-director Takeshi Kitano has made a movie which required over 80 swordfight specialists to be thanked in the credits, and in which so many people are stabbed, shot, burned, decapitated or otherwise that the kill count is likely in the thousands, but somehow the mayhem is entirely watchable. It’s not played for laughs but it’s not done as torture porn, either. This is a balance that’s virtually impossible to achieve but Mr. Kitano has done it. “Kubi” is quite the sensation.
Continue reading “An Exercise in Feudality” »
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
A Brighter Tomorrow (2023)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that once a middle-aged male artist hits a certain level of success, his works of art become only about the struggles of a middle-aged artist to maintain that level of success. Though normally this happens in literature – cf. every campus novel about a professor sleeping with his students – director Nanni Moretti is here interested in how a middle-aged filmmaker and former radical is meant to achieve genuine artistic success without the help of Netflix. And there is one mercy – the woman having a relationship with a much older man is the director’s daughter. So, time is marching on and looking up at least? Sometimes, yes, but for the most part this is a movie for making, not for watching.
Continue reading “Late-Life Crisis” »
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
Perfect Days (2023)
When Wim Wenders hits, he scores. “Perfect Days” is an unbearably emotional film about being able to find peace and joy in a daily routine that keeps you alive, and the happiness that follows from living, in however small a way, on your own terms. This is not a movie for children, by which is meant people who think life is a limitless playground of opportunity. This is a movie for adults, as in people who understand how choices and circumstances prescribe a life, and that the ways in which people cope with that are the only true choices you have.
Continue reading “Spark Joy” »
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
Fallen Leaves (2023)
It's good to be reminded that a country can have a social safety net that's the envy of the world without necessarily making life easy for its people. It's also good to be reminded that a person’s choices can make life easier or harder without the safety net coming into it, though of course accidents can and do happen. But writer-director Aki Kaurismäki has always been interested in exploring people whose lives are constrained either by circumstance (being broke in Finland) or choice (not focusing on education when young). But everyone deserves to be safe, warm and well-fed, that is taken for granted. It's the pursuit of happiness that's in question.
Continue reading “Star-Crossed” »
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
Omen (2023)
This has been quite a year for Baloji in the West. First one of his songs was used on the soundtrack of “Magic Mike’s Last Dance;” and now his first film has won a special New Voice prize in the Un Certain Regard track at the Cannes Film Festival, to reward his vision and encourage him to continue with his career. This film is also the first in the history of Cannes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a point the head of the festival, Thierry Fremaux, made pains to highlight. When Baloji introduced the film he was visibly shaking with nerves, but he needn’t have. This is a movie that manages to both be on the inside and the outside of a place – a difficult trick but one that’s achieved with flair. “Omen” is a very strong debut, and the jury was right to send such an encouraging message.
Continue reading “Witch Hunted” »
Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features
MOVIE REVIEW
Asteroid City (2023)
It's the way in which he uses physical things and precise language that makes him so easy to parody, but that is also his appeal. Wes Anderson is the only director currently working with such a clear visual style that it can be endlessly parodied without any further explanation. This is his gift but as “Asteroid City” makes clear, also his curse. Mr. Anderson is a sensitive, thoughtful director of grief and disappointment, but his messages of the need of kindness and the importance of true human connection are often lost under his aesthetic. That aesthetic overshadows how actors are fighting to work for him even in the smallest of parts; his gentle sense of humor is overlooked; and his willingness to explore even the tiniest detail within a frame makes his movies treasures which can be continually revisited without sound. On the other hand, deep in the credits of his newest offering, there’s mention of a yodelling consultant. So he’s on the verge of becoming a parody of himself.
Continue reading “Live at the Apollo” »
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
The Animal Kingdom (2023)
It's difficult to think of a more horrifying subject. Two years before the start of the film, something happened which meant certain people began turning into animals. As in, their bodies morphed into that of a creature; and their minds stopped being human minds and became animal ones. All the while this is happening these poor people are fully aware that it is happening but utterly powerless to stop it. And it's introduced by a father Francis (Romain Duris) and son Emile (an exceptional Paul Kircher) bickering in a car stuck in traffic, until Emile has had it and goes for a walk. Francis (whose name is a very good metaphor) chases him until one of the windows in a nearby ambulance shatters. They crouch down as the doors burst open and a paramedic is thrown out, before a man bursts out – a man with compress bandages around his face and one of his arms now a wing. The noises he makes aren't fully human and father and son stare in surprise as the winged man screams before running off over the roofs of the cars, paramedics giving chase. But they have seen all this before, of course. One of the first people to turn was Lana, Francis’s wife and Emile’s mother.
Continue reading “Devolution” »
Iglesias Más/Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIE REVIEW
Strange Way of Life (2023)
They don't even kiss; not their current counterparts, anyway. Silva (Pedro Pascal) and Jake (Ethan Hawke) were young cowboys together, and together in every sense of the word. Now Jake is a sheriff and Silva a rancher; and their meeting for the first time in 25 years is due to the awkward fact that Silva's son, Joe (George Steane), has killed Jake's sister-in-law. Has Silva decided to leverage the past in order to save his son? Or is there something else going on?
Continue reading “Sparring Partners” »
Well Go USA
MOVIE REVIEW
Born to Fly (2023)
“Born to Fly” is much, much more interesting than its top line, a.k.a. the Chinese answer to “Top Gun: Maverick.” The influence of American war movies is strong on this one, in that there are shots and plot beats lifted straight from “Top Gun” and “The Right Stuff,” but that is not the point. And while the opening sequence features English-speaking black-helmeted pilots (who are never directly called American) harming innocent Chinese workers, damaging Chinese property and flipping Chinese pilots the bird, this is not a standard war movie. It’s instead meant as a testament to ingenuity, in how the Chinese army develops its fighter jet program without international tech or innovations from elsewhere. On the one hand, this is a huge testament to the war tactics referenced in the opening lines of “Patton.” But from “Born to Fly’s” point of view, there’s something bigger at stake here.
Continue reading “Close to the Sun” »