“Us”
Wasting no time moving from one social minefield to another, Jordan Peele’s follow-up to his culture-shifting feature debut didn’t just put his audience on notice: it flat-out nailed us to the wall. Peele once again blends visual and textual metaphor in “Us” as the string upon which his narrative carrot dangles, using the notion of duality as both text and subtext. On the surface, this is a standard doppelganger horror flick, yet visual cues throughout the picture (a frisbee landing on a towel, the reoccurrence of the number 11, etc.) speak to the reflection of the self in society, and how that is concealed by layers of class and dramaturgy. Much has been made of the fact that “Get Out” was written pre-Trump, yet dropped when questions about race relations in America were as hotly contested as any period since the 1960s. “Us” lives in the murky waters of its moment more than any film in recent memory, however, when the politics of “other” dominate the American consciousness. Whether this theme speaks to a person via immigration, LGBTQ rights, class disparity, or race relations is the triumph of “Us,” for it refuses to bend to any one interpretation. A worthy follow-up to 2017’s game-changing “Get Out” moment, “Us” is the film America deserves in 2019. -Warren Cantrell
“Birds of Passage”
Tradition is a fragile and tenuous thing in the cinema of Ciro Guerra. The Colombian-born writer/director was first introduced to many cinephiles via 2015’s “Embrace of the Serpent.” That film was a hypnotic and hallucinatory meditation on the destructive powers of colonialism, as well as a hymn for the indigenous who have managed to keep their native rituals flourishing as dehumanizing external forces threaten to destroy the land they hold dear. ‘Serpent’ was like nothing we’d ever seen before: an arresting, thoroughly idiosyncratic blend of modern ethnography, docu-vérité realism, and the kind of “Heart of Darkness”-inspired fiction that has captured the imaginations everyone from Werner Herzog to James Gray. Despite the occasional trippy flourish and the disquieting stillness of its black-and-white cinematography, “Embrace of the Serpent” could be a tough film to find your way into. “Birds of Passage,” Guerra’s masterful follow-up, is a vastly more entertaining and accessible example of what this particular filmmaker is capable of. Like ‘Serpent,’ ‘Birds’ is a disquieting arthouse elegy for a hidden civilization, and an unforgettable tribute to a sadly forgotten world. It is similarly preoccupied with themes of nativism and colonialism (it’s no surprise to learn that the director’s next project is a long-gestating adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Waiting for the Barbarians,” set to star Robert Pattinson), and its cast is comprised of an intriguing mix of working professionals and gifted non-actors. Like great modern-day crime stories such as “City of God” and “Une Prophete,” “Birds of Passage” – which was co-directed by Christina Gallego, Guerra’s former romantic and creative partner – uses the basic template of a rags-to-riches narrative to meditate on the damaging nature of modern Western power structures. The film’s gut-punch of an ending is a stark reminder that, although we may have evolved as a species, there are certain ugly, timeless urges from which we know no escape. – NL [Our Review]
“Ash is Purest White”
Much as Hirokazu Kore-eda did for Japan with last year’s “Shoplifters,” Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke showed us a different side of China’s social stratum in the electrifying “Ash is Purest White.” It’s a pulpy, decade-spanning epic that reinvents the gangster film from the inside out, infusing the crime movie blueprint with a lyrical, elegiac heartbeat and stirring political subtext. Debuting at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Zhang-ke’s film follows a young dancer named Qia (a phenomenal Zhao Tao) and her gangster boyfriend, Bin (Liao Fan) as he ascends the ranks of a local mob in the economically impoverished town of Daton. After Bin is nearly beaten to death by a crew of rival gangsters, Qia takes the fall for him and serves five years in prison, receiving not a single visit during that time. It’s in the second chapter that the film truly takes shape, transforming into something eclectic, human, and moving. Zhang-ke infuses his story with a prescient cultural and sociological backdrop that shines a light on the changing landscape of China’s economy in the wake of a newly implemented capitalist system, making the fate of his characters all the more tragic and timely. While the third chapter ultimately falls short of the simmering, poetic tension of the first two chapters, ‘Ash’ packs a devastating and unexpected emotional punch. It’s the rare film that can inject new blood into a shopworn genre, endlessly surprising viewers on a scene-by-scene basis. This is intoxicating, invigorating, next-level filmmaking from one of China’s best working directors. [Our Review] – Max Roux
“Transit”
One of our favorite films of 2015 was “Phoenix,” co-written and directed by Christian Petzold. That languorous and gorgeously disorienting WWII-era thriller elevated a tale of recognizable tale of postwar intrigue into one of the year’s most powerful viewing experiences. For his follow-up to “Phoenix” – the gripping, airtight arthouse haiku “Transit” – Petzold goes a step further in blurring the line between past and present. Petzold’s latest is a confident and riveting meditation on statelessness and the shifting malleability of identity: as indebted to the classic cinema of King Vidor and Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” as “Phoenix” was to classic noir and Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (for what it’s worth, there are also shades of the second half of Ingmar Bergman’s stellar “Shame” here as well). Petzold’s latest possesses a ruinous, mysterious power: one where the mood of the film’s characters lingers with the viewer like a ghost for days after an initial viewing. The central ingredients of “Transit” are almost as old as cinema itself: a handsome, enigmatic lead character (played by haunted lead Franz Rogowski, giving off major Joaquin Phoenix vibes and to be seen next in Terrence Malick’s acclaimed Cannes entry “A Hidden Life”), metropolitan cities under the iron heel of fascism, ordinary encounters simmering with paranoia, and an overwhelming urge to break away. The hypnotic and rigorous sensory language of “Transit” feels like a welcome, classically-minded breath of fresh air in a moviegoing climate increasingly crowded with noisy superhero reboots and brainless genre items. With “Transit,” Christian Petzold has pulled off an elusive and exacting cinematic magic trick. We don’t exactly know how he did it, and frankly, we don’t want to know. This is the kind of film that’s going to receive a well-deserved Criterion release in about four to five years – mark our words. – NL [Our Review]
“Her Smell”
Alex Ross Perry is a filmmaker who enjoys testing the limits of what his audience will put up with from his characters. With “Her Smell” – the director’s merciless attempt to capture the downward spiral and hard-won redemption of a riot grrrl rocker with some debilitating addictions and serious mental health issues – Perry is giving audiences his most disagreeable character to date. You thought Jason Schwartzman was insufferable as a self-obsessed Brooklyn author in the director’s outstanding “Listen Up, Philip?” Wait until you see Elisabeth Moss (better than she’s ever been) as hell-raising rocker Becky Something going for her bandmate’s throat with a broken beer bottle. With “Her Smell,” Perry is attempting to put the Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach comparisons to bed for good. The director’s sixth film is a more graceful, mature outing than any of his earlier works, even as it seems engineered to test its audience’s patience. “Her Smell” also establishes, once and for all, that the director’s interest is not horrible people behaving horribly merely for the sake of it. Rather, Perry remains interested in the frail but still-beating heart that often lies dormant beneath people’s self-constructed mountains of narcissism. “Her Smell” borrows the conspicuously theatrical structure from Danny Boyle’s “Steve Jobs” by staging three extended scenes in agonizing real time, before slowing down and giving the audience two concluding sequences that offer a relative measure of placidity. Structurally, it’s an ingenious gamble. What’s more, “Her Smell” proves that Perry isn’t some heartless sadist in the Lars Von Trier vein. On the contrary, he truly loves Becky Something, even when we can’t stand being in the same room with her. This is a major bounce back from the miscalculated “Golden Exits,” and proof that Alex Ross Perry does have a heart after all. On the evidence of this movie, it’s a big one. – NL [Our Review]
“Long Day’s Journey Into Night”
Is there a more overworked adjective used to describe movies than “dreamlike?” After David Lynch redefined the notion of modern surrealism with his twin masterworks “Mulholland Drive” and “Inland Empire,” a slew of copycats followed. Anything that was even moderately left-of-center was lazily described as “dreamlike” or even “Lynchian” (groan). Alas, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” – an entrancing jazz riff of a second feature from Chinese visual poet Bi Gan – is a film that actually earns that overused descriptor. The exoskeleton of the story itself is noir 101: an aloof yet determined man pursues an unknowable femme fatale against the glistening neon backdrop of a kind of permanent midnight. And yet, this rudimentary description gives little indication of the creeping, nightmarish power that Bi Gan’s second feature exerts over its viewers. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is a nocturnal musing about the deadly power of memories, and a film that does nothing less than pose the question of whether or not we can choose to live in our imagination. Behind the camera, Bi Gan displays shocking confidence. Every cinematographic decision is so precisely realized and so utterly unexpected, that it’s hard to believe that a.) this director is only 30 years old and b.) he’s only made one other movie, 2015’s justly acclaimed “Kaili Blues.” As a pure art object, the film is nothing short of sublime (much has been made of the concluding 45-minute single take, and for good reason: it’s truly like nothing we’ve ever seen before). There’s a dash of Wong Kar-Wai in the opening scenes – filled as they are with cigarette smoke, male longing, and nighttime anomie – but also the beatific serenity of Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The magnificent final image even feels like a poignant, knowing rebuke to the over-discussed closing shot of Christopher Nolan’s “Inception”. Good luck getting this one out of your head.– NL [Our Review]
“The Beach Bum”
Make no mistake; Harmony Korine is one of the most recalcitrant artists currently working in American cinema. Even the director’s most accessible movie, the jagged “Mister Lonely,” features skydiving nuns and a foul-mouthed Abraham Lincoln. Korine’s unconventional artistic evolution bloomed into something gloriously fetid in his masterpiece “Spring Breakers,” which is one of the greatest films in recent memory about the noxious underside of our youth-obsessed American Dream. With that A24-produced crossover hit, Korine appeared to have gone mainstream on his small, but loyal, niche audience. As it turns out, that wasn’t exactly true: instead of Korine going mainstream, the mainstream had simply gone Korine. The director’s latest opus – a hazy, aggressively out-there stoner comedy called “The Beach Bum” – features the director’s most mainstream cast to date. Matthew McConaughey, jubilantly riffing on his own weed-scented playboy persona, plays the film’s nominal protagonist: a sin-addicted exhibitionist and poet laureate of pleasure with the unforgettable name of Moondog. Snoop Dogg is also in the mix as Lingerie, our hero’s unflappable co-conspirator. Jonah Hill shows up with as a dandyish literary agent with a Bayou accent that’s a few octaves south of “The Waterboy.” Martin Lawrence returns from an eight-year screen absence in an instantly iconic role as an inept, dolphin-obsessed nautical tour guide named Captain Wack, who feeds cocaine to his pet parakeet. The result feels like a mid-period “Cheech and Chong” vehicle (think “Nice Dreams” or “Next Movie”) shot through the avant-garde lens of “Stroszek”-era Werner Herzog. Like all of Korine’s films, “The Beach Bum” is a freakshow for the ages: a work of bleary-eyed anti-establishment art that feels like no one but its creator could have authored it. It’s a relentlessly vulgar and strangely charming celebration of pursuing joy at any and all costs –by far the funniest work Mr. Korine has ever produced, even with its proverbial middle finger raised to the sky. Though much of it is done in questionable taste, “The Beach Bum” is nothing more than a sweet, sunny dopamine shot of pure rebel bliss for those of us who need to check out of the world as it burns to the ground around us. And like everything Korine does, “The Beach Bum” is one of a kind: it stands out like a cotton-candy-colored seashell in today’s woefully generic movie-going landscape. – NL [Our Review]
“John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum.”
No one could have predicted what a lucrative, endlessly inventive franchise “John Wick” would turn out to be when the first film landed on everybody’s radar like a bloody severed appendage back in 2014. The original ‘Wick’ boasted an ingeniously simple hook: Keanu Reeves, he of the stoic-surfer countenance, played a retired assassin propelled back into his savage trade to avenge the death of his slain pooch. To everyone’s surprise, the recipe worked, reinvigorating Reeves’ dwindling star after a series of uninspired turns that squandered the actor’s brand of timeless cool. Then came “John Wick: Chapter 2,” which magnified the dimensions of the humble first film to the size of a Macy’s Day Parade float. The superior sequel introduced an entire underground network of professional executioners, plus arcane forms of currency (“markers”), and fleshed out the luxuriant five-star hotel (the Continental) that exclusively catered to the contract killer set. So where exactly does that leave “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum,” the most ambitious and ridiculous entry in this shockingly sturdy series? If you remain curious, check the film’s subtitle. The Latin definition of “Parabellum” roughly translates to “prepare for war,” and that’s exactly what both ‘Wick’ die-hards (as well as the uninitiated) should do before purchasing a ticket to this overwhelming, gore-strewn, and ultimately, quite thrilling spectacle of acrobatic gun-fu bloodletting. Granted, guns aren’t the only weapons deployed in returning director Chad Stahelski’s stellar third entry: knives, swords, belts, attack dogs, and even library books are deployed as armaments with which Wick can dispatch his many foes (after using said library book to neutralize an enemy, Wick puts the book politely back in its designated row – because why wouldn’t he?). A melee that unfolds within the claustrophobic close quarters of an antiques shop is a spectacular, knife-throwing delight, and a scene where Wick outruns his attackers through New York City traffic (on horseback, no less!) is like something out of a Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon. ‘Wick’ superfans will be hooting and hollering with every headshot, impaling, and droll one-liner. And at the center of all this glorious, overheated madness is Reeves, who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the gravitas he instills into these very silly films. Has there ever been an action star that did so much and made it look so easy? – NL [Our Review]
“Diane”
There’s the popular, shortsighted idiom, “those who can’t do, teach.” A similar kind of maxim is often also applied to movies, with many people calling film critics, writers and programmers failed filmmakers. Even if it were true, the cliché is smashed to bits by Kent Jones, Director of the New York Film Festival, part of New York’s prestigious Film At Lincoln Center society and a contributing critic and writer for Lincoln Center’s Film Comment magazine. Jones is at the epic-center of cinema in New York and he’s already created two terrific documentaries (“Hitchcock/Truffaut” and “A Letter to Elia” co-directed by a guy you may have heard of named Martin Scorsese) among many other writing credits. And Jones does narrative too– his feature-length debut “Diane” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and secured a release this year from IFC Films. Giving the unlikely spotlight to character actress Mary Kay Place (you’ve seen her in dozens of films over the last three decades) and the character of aging, lonely mother that doesn’t get much attention, Jones’ deeply empathetic and profound meditation on life and death is a harrowing, but beautiful, piece of work that seeks to humanize and give voice to those we’ve forgotten. It’s also a little bit bleak and depressing, frankly, but it is, still, incredibly honest, emotionally intelligent and crafted with such innate care and understanding of the human condition. Jones it the kind of filmmaker who would be aghast if he insulted the intelligence of his audience and his drama about an aging mother who has to put care into her drug-addicted adult son and everyone but herself is respectful and affords every character such great dignity. Plus, it features a tremendous performance by Mary Kay Place which serves as a reminder that so many veteran character actors can knock it straight out of the park if you give them even half a chance. – RP [Our Review]