Critic's Notebook

Slow Country for Old Men

Kino Lorber

MOVIE REVIEW

Oh, Canada (2024)

By TIM HAYES

According to the cliché Paul Schrader's tormented males journal their pain and get it down on paper; but in "Oh, Canada" Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) might struggle to hold the pen. Enfeebled by terminal cancer, stuck in a wheelchair and in need of assistance on and off the lavatory, Leonard does a more cinematic thing and unburdens himself to a camera instead. As a renowned documentarian - the "Ken Burns of Canada" we hear - Leonard is supposed to be telling a camera crew about his life and times, including the 1960s flight from the U.S. Vietnam War draft that took him to the slower waters north of the border in the first place. This testimony involves Leonard directly addressing the camera, which the film, as an inside joke, calls the signature style of his documentaries. Mr. Schrader and anyone familiar with the work of Errol Morris knows that it's actually the Interrotron set-up that Mr. Morris uses for his own documentaries, designed to torment interviewees and lever confessions out of people who know they have things to confess. Leonard fits the bill.

Once Upon a Time in the Steppes

International Film Festival Rotterdam

MOVIE REVIEW

Steppenwolf (2024)

By TIM HAYES

"Steppenwolf" starts and ends with recreations of the doorway shots from "The Searchers," which is wearing your Western heart on your sleeve; it also reverses one of them to say something different than John Ford had in mind. In between, writer-director Adilkhan Yerzhanov lays other Western homages on thick, and adds some samurai tones via Quentin Tarantino. But the presiding spirit in "Steppenwolf" is Sergio Leone, whose high-drama low-dialogue tactics Mr. Yerzhanov embraces like a favorite uncle. The film is set in some stylized form of the modern era, with truck convoys and armored cars and militarized police stations; but inside them the scowling taciturn men of Kazakhstan show unrefined Spaghetti Western cynicism about anything other than their own self-interest and whale into each other with claw hammers.

Arms and the Men

Fourth Act Film

MOVIE REVIEW

Hollywoodgate (2024)

By TIM HAYES

After centuries of conflict and decades of occupation by the latest foreign army, a country picks up the pieces. Local politics reforms; young men look for work; a diminished government takes stock of its military equipment to work out which guns function and which might fall apart when anyone pulls the trigger. It also ponders, in this case, what to do with $7 billion-worth of the most advanced efficient killing technology in existence, left behind by the United States. For this is Afghanistan in 2021: the weapons are those given to the Afghan government by the U.S. before the latter withdrew chaotically and the former fell apart; and the people finding the stuff left behind are the Taliban.

Show Biz Kids

Tribeca Festival

MOVIE REVIEW

Brats (2024)

By TIM HAYES

Andrew McCarthy was a likable young actor in his 20s and now makes a likable documentarian in his 60s, digging back into his own past life. "Brats" follows Mr. McCarthy on a road trip visiting some of the other former members of the group of 1980s actors loosely – or lazily – grouped together by the media under the label of "the Brat Pack," although the looseness and laziness of the term are two of the things that prove to rankle interviewer and interviewees alike. Having already written an autobiography under the title "Brat: An '80s Story" in 2021, Mr. McCarthy has gone from the singular to the plural, reconnecting with actors and crew he has not seen for decades, to test whether they are still unnerved by the memory of the B-word as much as he is.

All Under Control

Tribeca Festival

MOVIE REVIEW

S/He Is Still Her/e – The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary (2024)

By TIM HAYES

This film is subtitled "The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary," writer-director David Charles Rodrigues having received access to relevant family archives and the approval of the subject's daughters, attached here as executive producers. Whether official can mean definitive in this case is a different question. What would a definitive portrait even be of the English musician, performance artist, occultist, antagonist for the Britain's moldering Conservative establishment, loving parent, esotericist, associate of William S. Burroughs and protean engineer of their own identity in both mental and physical terms? Any 98 minute snapshot will only be a cross section, a slice through the matrix, a prompt to see how someone else's mapping of their own innerspace might shed some parallel light on your own.

Starlight Express

Tribeca Festival

MOVIE REVIEW

They're Here (2024)

By TIM HAYES

Those in search of understanding and knowledge in a difficult world can look inward, or outward, or if they're so inclined look upward to the stars in search of alien visitors. "They're Here" profiles a group of upstate New Yorkers on that third path, people who have seen unidentified flying objects or met the U.F.O.s' passengers; events that led them to rethink their place in the world and perhaps who they themselves are as well. This process takes different forms. They seek reassurance from academics that the data does support their experience, or allow hypnotists to root around in their memories, or just seek other people in the same boat who won't stare at them skeptically. Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez's calm, compassionate, perhaps too restrained documentary is about individuals with a variety of differences but at least one common trait: the wary and weary expression of people whose stable frames of reference were bumped six inches sideways and took them with it.

Bite Club

Shanna Besson/Apollo Films

MOVIE REVIEW
Dogman (2024)

By TIM HAYES

Many an underdog ultimately has their day – often it's her day – in Luc Besson films, and in "Dogman" some actual canines ride the roller-coaster of abuse and transcendence that the director likes to think about. So too does their male human ally, Douglas (Caleb Landry Jones), whose childhood of relentless suffering culminates when his own Neanderthal father blasts him with a shotgun for the crime of caring about some helpless and photogenic puppies. Now largely confined to a wheelchair, an adult Douglas lives in a dilapidated old school with a pack of equally world-weary dogs, liberated from a pound. After what must have been some formidable training, which the film declines to show, he and the dogs happily cohabit in mutual respect and support. They fetch Douglas the correct ingredients from the kitchen for his cooking, and listen raptly while he reads Shakespeare to them. Retreating from society but still helping those who come to him with problems, Douglas sends his canine colleagues out on coordinated missions of justice, like Nick Fury dispatching the Avengers. The dogs evade capture and squeeze past obstacles and scamper between legs and through closing doors in order to locate exactly the right Latino gangster, and then clamp their jaws on his nuts.

Sinnermen

Harry Pot/Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (2024)

By TIM HAYES

Johan Grimonprez, the documentarian behind "Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat," anticipates that his video essay will cause some controversy when it gets shown on the Belgian television networks that cofunded it. You might think it would cause some in the States and the corridors of the United Nations also, except that international involvement in the death of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961 has been accepted and historicized since roughly the day after it happened, relitigated by radical activist art and mentioned in Oliver Stone films as an example of exactly the kind of things Oliver Stone films are about. Mr. Grimonprez analyzes the affair through a huge quantity of rigorously cited archive footage, interviews, academic literature and testimony. And jazz, since the film wraps the Congo Crisis inside the global anticolonial currents surging at the time, reflected in Black music and U.S. civil rights struggles as much as anywhere else. But it's the Belgian colonial powers that look worst in the harsh light that Mr. Grimonprez shines on them.

L.A. Stories

Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW
Little Death (2024)

By TIM HAYES

Weird California strikes again in "Little Death," Los Angeles being the natural home of stories about scriptwriters strung out on drugs while cracking up, or of young adults on a night-time quest to find both stolen property and in a very real sense themselves. Director-cowriter Jack Begert finds house room for both those stories in one film, through the direct method of telling the first of them up to the halfway point and then following a dangling thread straight into the other. A TV series might do something similar for an episode; and Quentin Tarantino knits his characters together all the time with the kind of crime connection that happens here. But Mr. Begert does it bluntly, a suture. And he does it after a particular swerve in story number one that feels like he's improvising, riffing on themes that might cohere into something or might not.

Devil's Advocates

Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW
Realm of Satan (2024)

By TIM HAYES

Cheerful locals and neighbors, if not yours then somebody's, go about their normal domestic lives in Scott Cummings's nonnarrative Sundance-premiering documentary "Realm of Satan." They clean their nice black Maseratis; they hang the laundry on the line; they empty the dishwasher. They engage in mildly fetishistic sex and cavort a little in the woods around Poughkeepsie, N.Y., although some of these good folk are comfortably middle-aged and the level of cavort might be limited by wear to the knees. They live in well appointed houses full of terrific heavy drapes and esoteric knick-knacks and the odd goat or raven allowed indoors, plus several portraits of Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan to which they all belong. They are living their best lives, as should we all.