→ March 8, 2023
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Broker.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 film Shoplifters was my #3 film of that year, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, depicting a cobbled-together family of thieves who come together because the world beyond hasn’t provided them with the structure they desire. It’s a simple story where nothing substantial happens, deriving its huge emotional power from small interactions and gradual revelations about the five core characters.

Kore-eda’s most recent film, Broker, is his first Korean-language movie, and stars Song Kang-ho of Parasite as one of two baby ‘brokers’ who sell abandoned babies, illegally, to couples looking to adopt. It shares a core theme with Shoplifters, as we see five people come together to form another would-be family, one even closer to the dynamic of a biological family, but does so with more plot and more suspense than Shoplifters, counteracting the familiarity of the earlier film. (You can rent Broker on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Song plays Ha Sang-Hyeon, owner of a laundry business who also volunteers at a church where there’s a baby box, a place where anyone can leave a baby they wish to give up for adoption. He and his friend Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) steal some of these babies to sell them on the black market for a few thousand dollars, which they also justify to themselves as saving the babies from going to an orphanage. This all goes awry when one mother, Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun, a K-pop singer who records as IU), comes back after abandoning her baby, and ends up accompanying the two men on their visits to would-be buyers. They’re pursued by two policewomen, Detectives Lee and Soo-jin, who have been trying to catch the baby brokers in the act of selling a child so they can arrest the two men, although it turns out that Soo-jin (Bae Doona) has additional motives for her ardor in this search.

The brilliance of both of these Kore-eda films lies in the telling, in the dialogue and the small moments and the way his characters reveal themselves through their interactions with each other and the world around them. All three of the main characters have elements in their histories that we learn as the film progresses that further explain their motivations, but more importantly just reveal more about who they are. The script is smarter than just connecting A to B, than saying that one character does something specific because some other thing happened in their past; it uses those past events to provide depth and definition to all three of the main characters, and even to a couple of the secondary characters as well.

Song earned the Best Actor award at Cannes in 2022 for his work in Broker, becoming the first Korean actor to win the honor there, continuing the rise in global acclaim that began with his work in Parasite, although he already had a few cases’ worth of honors in South Korea and elsewhere in Asia going back a quarter of a century. He’s the core of this transient family, and his understated performance in Broker gives the film the anchor that allows some of the other actors to go bigger with their individual characters. This is just Lee Ji-eun’s second major film role, and she’s a revelation – I doubt anyone would guess she was a singer by trade from watching her nuanced, affecting performance as a mother who has her reasons for wishing to give up her baby but is also determined to see him go to the right family. Just about every character here is damaged in some way, but none of the performances, even the side ones, are showy or loud.

I adored Shoplifters, and I think that colored my experience with Broker. Both revolve around makeshift families, and both understand that families can be what we make of them. Many people do not have the privilege of strong biological ties, of two parents or siblings or extended relations who are present in their lives, but both of these films explore the ways in which some people forge those relationships on their own – perhaps unwittingly, because we need that sort of connection in our lives. Broker is an excellent film, and is different enough from Shoplifters thanks to some of the suspense in the second half to stand on its own, but I also think I loved it a little less because it treads some ground familiar to me from the earlier film.

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→ February 28, 2023
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Nope.

Nope is the third feature film from writer-director Jordan Peele, who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the outstanding Get Out, which was a biting satire wrapped in a smart horror film. For some reason, the studio behind Nope tried to pitch it more as another horror film, but that’s not just underselling it, but also probably misrepresented it. This is much more of a sci-fi mystery with a surprising moral to it, another smart film from Peele but in a completely different vein from his debut. (I haven’t seen Us, his second film.) You can stream Nope on Peacock or rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as the siblings OJ and Em Haywood, who run a horse farm where they train the animals for roles in film and television. As Nope begins, their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), is killed by metal debris that falls from the sky, with a nickel impaling him in the eye and a key embedded itself in the horse he was riding. They assume these fell from an airplane and eventually they try to pick up more business, but when they find it’s lagging, OJ sells some of his horses to the nearby western theme park Jupiter’s Claim, run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star whose TV series ended in tragedy when the chimp who starred on the show became violent to several of the cast members – but not to Jupe. When the electricity starts going off on the Haywoods’ farm without explanation, and the horses start reacting badly to some unseen force, the siblings decide to invest in some high-tech cameras to try to figure out what’s going on.

Nope is a slow burn, similar to Get Out, but not quite the same – where Peele’s first film was sinister until the big reveal, this one unfurls its mystery by degrees, with more misdirection that allows you to experience the perspectives of multiple characters. It was also easier to figure out what was happening in Get Out, or at least get the sense, than what’s happening in Nope. The obvious answer would be that it’s a UFO, which, of course, most of the characters think is the answer, including the Fry’s Electronics employee Angel (Brandon Perea), who realizes from the start that something weird is happening out at the ranch and invites himself to be a part of the investigation. What they find is much more interesting on a literal level and a thematic one.

The cast is fantastic across the board. Kaluuya has never missed for me, right down to his pre-fame appearance on Doctor Who (where we get to hear his British accent for once). The steely reserve that made him so menacing in Widows here works in a different direction, as his character is so tightly wound that he feels like he’s about to combust. Yeun probably needed more to do, but he’s excellent, as always, as a huckster and entrepreneur trying to squeeze every dollar he can out of the limited assets he has. Perea is a scene-stealer in a comic relief character that’s actually well conceived and well written – he’s hilarious, but also plays important roles in the plot and helps illuminate the relationship between the siblings and also later provide some connection to a fourth character who helps them try to unravel the ultimate mystery. If there’d been any awards attention for this movie, he would have been worthy of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, as well as a potential Original Screenplay nod for Peele. Wrenn Schmidt is a little wasted as Jupe’s wife, while Barbie Ferreira is even more wasted in a cameo as Angel’s co-worker, but I did enjoy the cameo from ‘80s prime-time soap star Donna Mills.

There’s one overarching theme to the story here that I might spoil by discussing, so if you haven’t seen Nope and intend to, you may wish to stop reading. The throughline that connects Jupe and the Haywoods is the use of animals for entertainment, with the implication that how we treat these animals in turn affects how they will treat us, or even what sort of animals they will become over time. OJ shows respect for their horses, and when he’s trying to show one horse, Lucky, for a commercial, he bristles at any suggestion from the director that might distress the animal, even telling a crew member not to make eye contact with Lucky for fear it will upset him. While we don’t see Jupe’s chimpanzee colleague being openly mistreated, the flashbacks – the one bit of the film where there’s some actual violence on screen – strongly imply that the chimp was being exploited, and that his rampage was the result of this treatment. (If you want to go down a rabbit hole about this, several critics and writers have noted that this subplot mirrors the actual story of Travis the chimp, who was separated from his mother at three days old and sold to a couple who kept him as a pet, only to have him turn violent one day, mauling and disfiguring a family friend.) All of this comes together in the film’s resolution, which also features some spectacular visual effects, to make it clear that the story is at least trying to make us realize the extent to which we are exploiting other creatures – and perhaps, on some level, other people – for no purpose beyond our entertainment. The characters who don’t understand this end up dead; the others survive. I don’t think you could make the moral much clearer than that.

Right now, I have Nope in my top ten for the year, although it could end up pushed out as I see more foreign-language films, since several of the most acclaimed non-English language movies, including two Oscar nominees, still aren’t available digitally as of February 27th. (Here’s hoping I wake up to find The Quiet Girl is rentable.) Regardless of its exact ranking for me whenever I wrap this cycle, Nope is excellent, another cerebral, thoughtful undertaking from Peele, even if it’s not quite up to the high bar he set for himself with Get Out.

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→ February 27, 2023
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Blonde.

Blonde isn’t just the worst movie I’ve seen from 2022, by a long shot; it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s a patched-together collection of scenes that barely connect to each other, jumping through aspect ratios and shutter speeds and even from color to black and white with neither rhyme nor reason, like a teenaged filmmaker’s limited understanding of what it means to be experimental. It also fails at its most important task – giving the audience an interesting, three-dimensional portrait of its lead character, Marilyn Monroe.

The film tries to do a cradle-to-grave story, although the script, based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name, isn’t going for any sort of accuracy – most of what’s in this film is made up, often leaning towards the lurid, which you could probably guess quickly by how much time Monroe (Ana de Armas) spends topless for no apparent reason. We see her abusive childhood with a mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson, giving maybe the only decent performance in the movie). When she’s removed from her mother’s care to an orphanage, the film jumps forward to her pin-up years, then to a meeting with a studio head who rapes her almost the minute she’s done reading, then through a meandering story that sideswipes the films she made while spending far more time on her tabloid romances, one of her miscarriages, and an abortion that apparently never happened. She meets and marries Joe DiMaggio (played by some actor doing a bad Bobby Cannavale impression), then meets and marries Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), with no chemistry between her and either of these men, and in the case of Miller, no explanation at all of why they ended up together. An ongoing subplot where Monroe receives letters from a man purporting to be her father, whose identity she never knew, ends ridiculously, leading Monroe to take her own life with barbituates.

There is no defending this movie. It’s badly shot, looks bad, poorly acted, and incredibly poorly written, from character to dialogue to pacing. The opening story with Monroe and her mother, which recalls a better-done scene involving Mitzi in The Fabelmans, is disjointed, dark, and features her mother using stilted, bizarre vocabulary that wouldn’t make sense for an adult talking to another adult, let alone a parent talking to a preteen child. The flips between color and black-and-white photography happen without reason, and add nothing to the film. Monroe’s character jokingly asks if she’s just “a piece of meat,” but that is exactly how this movie treats her – she’s a bag of flesh and bones to be passed around or discussed or ogled, but she has no agency, no depth, no explanation beyond these idiotic Freudian notions that she has daddy issues or desperately needs to be a mother. Even the idea that she wanted to be taken more seriously as an actor is only brought up in passing, where the script just sort of waves to the notion as is drifts on by. Marilyn Monroe in Blonde is nothing but a victim of the world. I can’t think of a less generous interpretation of her life.

There are two rape scenes in Blonde, the second of which is unspeakably gross and degrading, even beyond what a complete fabrication that particular scene is. The camera focuses its male gaze on de Armas’s face while she is performing oral sex and trying not to gag, and stays there for something like two minutes. It has no artistic intent or merit; it exists to shock. I guess it worked, but it also underscored just how terrible this movie is from conception to execution. I doubt I would ever defend the existence of an on-camera rape scene in any film, but this film’s version is the worst of the worst.

De Armas does a dutiful impersonation of Monroe, although she can’t entirely lose her Cuban accent (and she’s a lot smaller than Monroe was, which seems a very odd choice given all the efforts to otherwise make people in this movie look like their real-life counterparts). It’s just a dead character, and she isn’t capable of infusing any life into it. Her brief role in No Time to Die highlighted how ebullient and energetic she can be on screen; Blonde shows that a bad script can leave her a walking doe-eyed corpse. You could argue this isn’t her fault, but giving this performance an Oscar nomination for Best Actress is more an acknowledgement of the fact that she had to suffer through this awful film – as did everyone who voted for her – than a measure of actual quality. Giving de Armas a nod over Tilda Swinton (The Eternal Daughter) is a giant farce, and should have garnered way more controversy than the Andrea Riseborough one did. I can think of at least five other lead performances by actresses that would have been more worthy, and I’ve only seen about 36 films from the 2022 Oscar cycle.

(In no order: Emma Thompson from Good Luck to You, Leo Grande; Jennifer Lawrence from Causeway; Ruth Wilson from True Things; Florence Pugh from The Wonder; and Frankie Corio from Aftersun.)

No one else fares much better, although there’s a mercy in how many characters we see in that none of them is on screen for very long. The two actors playing Cass Chaplin and Eddy Robinson are the most cringe-inducing, as they’re both doing some kind of impersonation of Skeet Ulrich’s character from Scream, right down to the hair (wrong decade, guys), in yet another complete fabrication that in this case informs the movie’s incredibly ill-conceived climax.

Blonde barely qualifies as a movie. It’s an absolute mess. I admit that having not read the book, I may have been unprepared for how far it diverges from history. If I set that aside, however, this movie is still garbage. Norma Jean deserved so much better.

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→ February 26, 2023
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To Leslie.

Like most people, even like most film critics, I had never heard of To Leslie before the surprise nomination of Andrea Riseborough for Best Actress in this year’s Academy Awards in late January. The film had taken in just $27,000 at the U.S. box office and had just a handful of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes at the time; there are far more reviews now but they’re almost all new as critics have rushed to catch up. Despite the controversy over how Riseborough ended up getting the nomination, To Leslie is quite a good film, and deserves the much wider audience it’s received, with standout performances from Riseborough and from her co-star Marc Maron. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

To Leslie is supposedly based on a true story, although the real person who inspired it has never been named that I can find. Leslie (Riseborough) is a single mom in west Texas who wins $190,000 in a local lottery, but who spends it all, mostly on alcohol, abandoning her 13-year-old son, losing her friends, and ending up homeless. The film jumps forward to the point where she’s been kicked out of the motel where she was living and has to call her son, James (Owen Teague). He lets her stay with him if she quits drinking, but that goes as you’d expect, and her life continues to spiral downward until she ends up at another motel run by Sweeney (Maron), where she gets a job cleaning rooms that also includes a place to stay. The majority of the film comes after that point and watches her struggle to stay sober, find some sort of purpose, and deal with the notoriety she’s acquired through her windfall and how publicly she squandered it.

There are, of course, a lot of addiction/redemption stories out there, and To Leslie is very much of that ilk, but it does several things to distinguish itself from its peers. One is that it doesn’t lionize the addict. Leslie’s kind of a terrible person. She’s not just a fuck-up, to use the technical term, but really does not seem to grasp the effects of her actions on other people at all, most notably how her choices in life have affected her son. She’s not the addict with a heart of gold for whom you just can’t help but root; I was rooting for Leslie because I didn’t want to see things continue to get worse for her, or to see her cause more misery for anyone around her. There’s no sense of “oh, if only she could get better, she’d be this wonderful mother/friend/person.”

To Leslie also doesn’t provide much in the way of magical solutions to addiction. Sweeney certainly helps her, but in a more practical sense, rather than, say, dispensing words of wisdom or some pop philosophy. Royal (Andre Royo) also lives and works at the motel, and he knows Leslie from childhood, so he’s seen her act and is very disinclined to help her, even trying to convince Sweeney not to give her the job or a room. Nance (Allison Janney), who we only know at the start as a former friend of Leslie’s, is openly antagonizing her in public. There’s no panacea here and no too-perfect friend or family member to offer a cure. Instead, Leslie pretty much has to do this on her own.

Riseborough is on camera for virtually the entire movie, giving this role a level of difficulty that few of her peers could match for this year. It is, truly, a tremendous performance, on par with Cate Blanchett’s in Tár, which I had as the best performance by an actress I’d seen so far in this cycle (even though, sentimentally, I’m pulling for Michelle Yeoh). She’s completely lost in the role, so it’s hard to even remember that she’s English, let alone that she’s not actually Leslie. It’s a fine line to walk to keep this character interesting without making her too pathetic or making her detestable, and Riseborough manages to stay on it. (She’s also great in the musical adaptation of Matilda, which came out last year on Netflix.) Maron is also excellent, giving Sweeney some nuance and complexity without making him too nice, or too sappy, or too much of anything. He’s a regular guy, and while his interest in helping Leslie isn’t that well explained by his back story – it’s just not that plausible – their interactions come across as very real. None of the supporting actors have that much to do, with Janney slightly wasted in her one-note role, while Stephen Root, who plays her partner Dutch, suffers from a lack of screen time.

As for the controversy over the nomination … I get why the Academy has those rules in place, but this is a good outcome for Riseborough, for the movie, and for the awards themselves. Maybe it’s a reminder to everyone involved that there are always great performances that get overlooked because the movies are too small or commercially unsuccessful. I’d probably still vote for Blanchett, but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who thinks Riseborough is better.

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→ February 23, 2023
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The Fabelmans.

Steven Spielberg has apparently been trying to make a semi-autobiographical film for over twenty years, but waited until his parents died before producing it. He finally did so with last year’s The Fabelmans, a thinly-veiled rendering of his childhood and teenage years with a particular eye on the relationship between his parents. I don’t think Spielberg is capable of making a bad movie, but he is capable of missteps within his movies, and the way he depicts his parents here through their surrogates detracts from the movie’s overall power. (It’s available to rent on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano) Fabelman are Jewish couple living in New Jersey, near Philadelphia, in 1952, when they take their son Sammy to see his first film, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Sammy is entranced, especially by the movie’s train-crash scene, and this sparks what becomes a lifelong love of the movies. The young Sammy’s burgeoning interest in filmmaking is set against the drama of his parents’ failing marriage, his mother’s apparent connection to his father’s best friend and colleague Bennie (Seth Rogen), and his mother’s mental health issues. The story takes us through the family’s moves to Arizona and then California, while Sammy makes films, often involving his younger sisters, dates the most comically Christian girl you could imagine, and encounters antisemitic bullies at his WASPish high school.

By far the best parts of The Fabelmans are the movies within the movie. There’s incredible care taken to depict the results of these efforts by Sammy, but also how he combined the ingenuity he inherited from his engineer father with the artistic sensibilities of his pianist mother to create and improve the sort of illusions he loved so much in Greatest Show. These track with the actual film projects from Spielberg’s youth, short films up through the longer documentary-style movie he made of senior skip day at his high school. It’s a little behind-the-scences peek at old-school moviemaking, and often quite joyous.

Sammy’s parents are so strangely drawn, however, that the scenes that center on either or both of them all feel too sharp-edged, bordering on caricature. Burt, who is based on Spielberg’s highly successful inventor father Arnold, is a milquetoast who does basically nothing while his wife openly flirts with his best friend, and just generally seems oblivious to most of what’s going on in his own house. There are hints about his ambitions at work, but it’s oddly unbalanced, especially since Spielberg has said that his father was a major influence on his own career, something that is completely absent from the film. Dano plays Burt with a simpering affect that makes the character seem sad and pitiable, but not interesting or complex. Mitzi is depicted with somewhat greater depth, although there’s still something hollow about the writing (not the portrayal), as if this is Spielberg’s visualization of his mother rather than an attempt to write and depict her as a complete person. It’s more sympathetic than empathetic, and while I suppose it’s not my place to tell a writer how to portray his mother on film, it doesn’t read well to me as a viewer.


There are several supporting performances here that stand out, not least of them a brief turn from Judd Hirsch as Mitzi’s uncle, who appears unannounced, spends a few days with the family to sit shiva after Mitzi’s mother dies, and then leaves after imparting some essential wisdom to Sammy. It’s the standout performance of the film, reminiscent of Judi Dench’s Oscar-winning turn in Shakespeare in Love (“Have a care with my name, you’ll wear it out”), which parlayed about 13 minutes of screen time into an Academy Award. Hirsch might have even less time in The Fabelmans, but it’s by far the best performance of the movie. Rogen gives a very solid turn as Bennie, further underscoring his shift as a serious actor after his excellent work as the carpenter-cum-thief in Pam and Tommy. Gabriel LaBelle is excellent as the teenaged Sammy, even when he’s more observer than participant in the action; there are a couple of scenes with Sammy and Mitzi where Sammy is the more interesting character, and LaBelle pulls these off well. (Also, he kind of looks like a younger Barry Keoghan.) And there’s a cameo later in the film that I won’t spoil but that involves someone known better as a director than as an actor and who is clearly having a blast in a tiny role.

Spielberg’s best work usually revolves around Big Things. His most critically acclaimed films rely more on broad brush strokes in plot and character, while he’s had more difficulty when he’s trying to work small, whether it’s nuance in story and theme or characters who require more three-dimensional depictions. The Fabelmans falls into the second category. As a love letter of sorts to the movies, and a memoriam to his parents, it’s fine, but as an actual film, it’s lacking. The story is thin and the two main characters are just too two-dimensional.

The Fabelmans picked up seven Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Williams, Best Supporting Actor for Hirsch, and Best Original Screenplay for Spielberg and Tony Kushner, the latter marking Spielberg’s first-ever Academy Award nomination for screenwriting. I won’t be surprised if it goes 0 for the awards this year; it’s not the favorite, nor should it be, in any of those five categories, at least. Hirsch might be the most deserving, but Ke Huy Quan is better and he’s the favorite. Williams gives a good-not-great performance, limited by the way the character is written, although the scene at the campsite is sublime. (I do want to know why she can’t move the top half of her face, though.) This is a movie about how great movies are, so I can’t rule it out even for Best Picture, but the odds are against it. Perhaps there’s a sop to Spielberg in the Screenplay category, but that could easily be the place the voters honor Tár, assuming Everything Everywhere All at Once remains the favorite to win the whole thing. I can’t see picking The Fabelmans anywhere it’s nominated, though. It’s a perfectly adequate film, but it’s not Spielberg’s best, and I think highlights what he does well because so much of this film is about things that he doesn’t.

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→ February 12, 2023
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Causeway.

Causeway is a solid little film, and I mean that in a very positive way. It reminded me a ton of Columbus, the 2017 debut feature from Kogonada (whose After Yang I still need to catch up with); and of Driveways, maybe a little bit because of the similar names. It’s not quite as good as either of those movies, as the script itself is thinner and less credible, but like those two films, it’s anchored by two outstanding performances by its leads. (It’s streaming on Apple TV.)

Jennifer Lawrence plays Lynsey, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who suffered a traumatic brain injury when an IED hit her convoy, forcing her to come back to the U.S. for rehabilitation. She’s struggling with all aspects of the injury, including accepting that she can’t return to combat immediately once she’s regained most of her physical functions. After she has a panic attack in traffic and damages the car from her temp job cleaning pools, she befriends the owner of the garage where she takes it, James (Brian Tyree Henry), and the two form an unlikely, platonic friendship where the two talk through their problems and fears with each other in a way that Lynsey certainly can’t do with her family.

Like the two other films I mentioned above, Causeway is a talkie – if you don’t like movies that are about 90% dialogue, this probably isn’t for you. I am very much in the target demographic for that sort of film, because they often feel to me like well-written novels or novellas, and I’m perfectly happy to spend an hour and a half with two interesting characters even if there isn’t much action or romance. There’s no action here, and the closest thing to romance is a failure – which is good because it’s not the least bit credible when it does happen. It’s two people, each haunted by trauma, having honest and realistic conversations about themselves, revealing their feelings by degrees, holding things back as people do when dealing with guilt and shame.

Henry was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his work here, and he’s deserving. He’s been an actor to watch for years now, making huge impressions in Widows and If Beale Street Could Talk. I’m thrilled to see him get a leading role (regardless of the Supporting tag, he’s the co-lead here) and to get recognition for his film work after he’s received two Emmy nominations for his work on Atlanta. Lawrence is predictably strong here in a role that’s more understated than much of her previous work, including three of the four times she’s earned an Oscar nomination, which might have worked against her here. I did find it funny when the owner of the pool-cleaning company asks if her character is “home from college,” since Lawrence is 32, although she does look pretty young in the film because of how they dress the character.

The bar for a film like this to clear to be a truly great movie is pretty high – it’s like how a corner outfielder just has to hit that much more to be a potential star. I don’t think Causeway clears it. There are aspects of the relationship between James and Lynsey that aren’t entirely credible, and there’s a part of her back story that is never adequately explained given its prominence in her character’s current state. The film also favors Lynsey over James too much, rather than giving the two characters equal weight in the script and in the way they help each other, which unfortunately opens the film to criticism that James’ character is the “magical” Black man there to help the white lead. (I don’t think it applies, but I concede the possibility that I’m wrong.) Instead, Causeway is merely very good, a film of modest ambitions that largely achieves them, and that’s worth watching on its own merits and for what Henry and Lawrence bring.  

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→ February 10, 2023
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Triangle of Sadness.

Triangle of Sadness was a surprise nominee for Best Picture this year, also taking home nods for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. It’s the first film for writer/director Ruben Östlund since 2017’s The Square, and like that film, it’s a disjointed story that starts out with great ambitions and ends up succeeding most when it focuses on its simpler themes. (You can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

The triangle of the title refers to the film’s tripartite structure, which I would summarize as “fine, bad, good,” in that order. We start out by following two models, Yaya (Charlbi Dean, who died just before the film premiered) and Carl (Harris Dickinson), who are in a relationship but fight over seemingly trivial matters like who’s paying for the check in a restaurant – she makes far more money than he does, but gender roles dictate that he should pay. She’s also a social media influencer, which leads to an invitation for the two of them to go on a cruise on a luxury yacht, where they meet a bunch of fairly horrible rich people and mostly ignore the obsequious crew, who are themselves divided into the mostly white upstairs staff and the mostly nonwhite cleaning and cooking staff. The ship sinks, and a group of survivors wash up on an island where they have to find a way to survive, but it turns out only Abigail (Dolly De Leon), who barely appeared in the film’s first two parts, has any skills pertinent to staying alive.

The 2022 film and TV cycle was full of “rich people are terrible” themes, from White Lotus to Tár to The Menu, and Triangle of Sadness offers nothing new in this vein, which ultimately is the movie’s undoing. Yaya is vapid and a shallow stereotype of the Instagram model/influencer, right down to having Carl photograph her about to take a bite of a pasta dish that she won’t eat because she’s “gluten intolerant.” The rich people they meet on the boat barely need names, as they don’t even rise to the level of caricatures, with just one of them (Winston) serving some real function beyond being wealthy and horrible, and in that case it’s for a pretty good joke that has a strong payoff later in the segment. It’s only when we get to part three, on the island, that any characters get real development and show some depth, including Abigail, and the script finally makes good use of its ire towards the idle rich. It takes way too long to get to that point, however, and Östlund could have just made the whole movie out of that and given us a better end product.

That middle section, though, is a mess, figuratively and literally – I asked a friend if he’d seen the movie, and he hadn’t, but he asked if I meant the film where everyone throws up on a boat. There’s about ten minutes of people suffering from food poisoning, projectile vomiting around the dining room and in the halls, which is later followed by the ship’s waste disposal system backing up, just in case you weren’t already sufficiently grossed out. It’s a two-minute gag that goes on forever, exacerbated by a dreadful bit where the drunk captain (Woody Harrelson, mostly wasted here) engages in a superficial debate between capitalism and communism with a wealthy Russian oligarch who made his money in fertilizer (or, as he says, “shit”) over the ship’s PA system. It’s unfunny, and consists more of the two men, both thoroughly inebriated, spouting aphorisms from other writers, reminiscent of college students arguing over these subjects because they took one class on Marx and are now experts in the field.

The third section redeems the film to some extent, and ends with multiple points of ambiguity that work extremely well, although it just shows how much better Triangle of Sadness could have been. The Square was also full of interesting ideas, perhaps more so, but also ended with enough ambiguity to soften some of the too on-the-nose aspects of the satire within, right down to the question of whether we should feel any sympathy for the hapless yet arrogant and entitled main character. Here, Östlund’s targets are too easy, and because they’re all stranded on this island – how this is possible, or they could be stuck there for what seems like weeks, when most of these same people were still using their cell phones right when the ship sank – we have some sympathy for all of the characters, since we’re never hoping for any of them to die, or even really to suffer any further. (Not that any of that would be a good thing, either.) There’s a clear intent here to tell us that rich people are useless to society, and while I’m not exactly disagreeing with the point, the final third drifts away from it enough to undermine the first two sections, especially since it’s by far the funniest and best crafted of the film’s parts.

How this film ended up with a Best Picture nomination with a ten-minute scene of emesis and diarrhea is beyond me; I wonder if voters thought this made the film avant-garde. It’s not half as clever as it thinks it is, unfortunately, and other than De Leon, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance, none of the actors has much to work with. Aftersun and Decision to Leave come to mind as two films that the Academy’s voters were at least aware of, having given the former’s Paul Mescal a Best Actor nod and putting the latter on the shortlist for Best International Feature Film, that were both worlds better than this mess. If the final third existed just as a short film, I’d probably extol its merits, and praise the way the ending is open to multiple interpretations, too. Instead it’s just a tantalizing glimpse at what this film might have been if anyone had reined Östlund in. However, I do look forward to his next film, The Trapezoid of Mild Irritation.

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→ January 28, 2023
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All Quiet on the Western Front.

All Quiet on the Western Front took home nine nominations for this year’s Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best international Feature (as Germany’s submission). It is, as you might know, adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of World War I. It’s big, and epic, and certainly lets you know where everyone involves stands on the subject of war. (They think it’s bad.) It’s also a film that doesn’t have any good reason to exist.

Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) is our protagonist, an idealistic and nationalistic 17-year-old in Germany who signs up to fight for the fatherland in 1917, more than halfway through World War I. He and his schoolmates are quickly disabused of any notions of war as heroic or noble, as they’re thrown right into trench warfare and find one of their number dead before they can fire their first shot. We follow them through the next eighteen or so months, till the Armistice, as one by one they’re killed in battle, often in circumstances that might be ridiculous if they weren’t so tragic. Along the way, we see them hungry, disillusioned, bored, and filthy, along with occasional reminders of the use of chemical weapons that marked World War I for particular brutality. The film cuts away to scenes of negotiations between German and French leaders or discussions among German brass, all of which take place in relative luxury – and clean, dry conditions – compared to the sodden trenches in which Paul and his mates fight and die.

I had to read Remarque’s novel in high school and hated it, yet somehow, despite looking incredible, this film doesn’t do the book justice. There’s a key passage in the book where Paul goes home to visit family from the front and finds that he’s already changed enough that he can’t relate to his relatives and friends any more. They don’t understand what he’s been through, and he’s not the same person they knew before he went to fight. The film omits it entirely, in favor of those stolid scenes of generals and diplomats. The latter provides that strong contrast – there’s a scene where one of the men is upset because the croissants were clearly not baked that same morning – but it also wrecks any momentum the war story has, and it doesn’t help the character development in the way that the book’s scene where Paul goes home would have, something he doesn’t really get until a bit much later in the film when he’s trapped in no man’s land with a French soldier.

The movie does look fantastic, though, even when it’s gruesome. There are tremendous aerial shots of the battlefields, tight shots of the men in battle that put you uncomfortably close to the action, and trenches that I assume they just reused from 1917. One of the Oscar nominations came for Makeup and Hairstyling, and you can see why; these men look disgusting. There’s a clear commitment here to verisimilitude, and while I can’t say this is what World War I really looked like, it’s definitely what I think World War I really looked like.

All Quiet on the Western Front is about two and a half hours long, and not brisk, which gave me a lot of time to think about the bigger picture (pun intended), and I couldn’t escape the conclusion that this film doesn’t need to exist. We don’t really need an anti-war movie, not of this sort, at least, when war hasn’t looked like this in a hundred years, and so much fighting today is done via drones that separate killer from victim. We don’t need another World War I movie, especially since we just had one four years ago, and that war doesn’t have the more enduring lessons to impart that World War II or Vietnam or Iraq (the second one) do. And this movie has nothing new to say about war or the book, which has been filmed at least twice before, including the 1930 American version that won Best Picture. New takes on existing films should bring something new, and this one can only offer better cinematography and makeup.

I can’t believe this film got nine nominations while Decision to Leave, South Korea’s submission for the Best International Feature Film award, was shut out. There’s no comparison here – Decision is an original story, a better story, better acted, and with more to say. Argentina, 1985 is better. La Caja, which didn’t even make the shortlist, is better. All Quiet is more technically ambitious, but it’s nowhere near as compelling as those films, and I don’t think the point of the Best International Feature award, where countries from all over the world should be competing on equal footing, is to reward the film with the biggest budget. This is a big movie, and a fine one, but it is absolutely not a great one.

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→ January 23, 2023
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Aftersun.

Aftersun is the debut feature from director Charlotte Wells, a lovely, bittersweet slice of memory that avoids big moments or clear answers. Featuring two outstanding performances by Paul Mescal and newcomer Frankie Corio, it gets under your skin, and lingers on the palate afterwards like a dessert with complex flavors. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc., or watch free on MUBI outside of the U.S.)

Mescal and Corio are Calum, a single dad, and his daughter Sophie, who embark on a long father-daughter vacation with a tour group to Turkey to celebrate his upcoming 31st birthday and her 11th birthday. It’s around the year 1999, based on some of the music (Blur’s “Tender” was released that year), and the two have brought a handheld video camera on the trip, allowing Wells to present some scenes as they would have been recorded by Calum or Sophie. As the trip progresses, it becomes clear that Calum is not doing well, as he shows signs of depression and makes offhand comments that offer a slight glimpse into his inner turmoil. That trip constitutes nearly all of the film; there’s just one brief scene afterwards, as we see an adult Sophie watching the end of the videotape(s) we’ve been watching with her.

To say more about Aftersun risks breaking the spell it casts upon the audience. I have a vague memory of an interview Tom Petty gave around 1991, saying that part of Bob Dylan’s genius as a songwriter was the way he could just drop you into a story without giving you all sorts of prologue or introduction; you’re just right in the story from the start, and he figures you’ll catch up. Aftersun functions exactly like that: There’s almost no introduction to these two characters, other than a brief scene near the start where we learn about their ages and imminent birthdays. Wells allows us to learn about the characters through dialogue, such as that Sophie’s mum and Calum are divorced, or that she lives with her mum in Scotland and only visits Calum in London occasionally – or for a special trip like this one. It is a difficult way to tell a story, but Wells executes it flawlessly. By the end of Aftersun, you know Sophie, and you know Calum well enough to try to understand him as adult Sophie is likely trying to do by watching these old videos. He’s not declining over the course of the trip, but we see the vicissitudes of his mental state, sometimes through Sophie, but also sometimes when he’s on his own, raising the question of how much of what we see actually happened and how much is Sophie trying to fill in the gaps.

Both Mescal and Corio are superb in Aftersun, as they must be, with virtually no other characters getting more than a few lines. I had only seen Mescal in his small role in The Lost Daughter, and he is a presence here, with instant credibility as a young, single dad, adrift in his life, loving his daughter and increasingly aware of his deficiencies (or perhaps exaggerating them) as a father. Corio had never acted in anything prior to Aftersun, which is just shocking given the performance she delivers here, playing a kid her own age with the aplomb of an actor who’s playing down a few years. Sophie is trying to figure out her dad while she’s also at an age when she’s trying to figure out herself – her interactions with some teenagers staying at the resort are unrelated to the father-daughter storyline but crucial both in expanding our understanding of her character and in anchoring us to the time in her life when all of this is occurring. Corio gets even tiny details right, like the look on her face when the teens first invite her to come hang out with them, without her dad; she’s there, quietly smiling, but also so clearly absorbing everything she can take in, as if she’s studying this alien species, the Teenager, to better understand them.

Aftersun ends on an ambiguous note, and I’m fine with that in this case. This isn’t a mystery or thriller that demands explanation. The actual details don’t matter for the narrative in the film – what happened after the camera stopped rolling, so to speak, is immaterial. If anything, Wells’ choice not to give any sort of epilogue redirects your thinking back to what you did see and pushes us into adult Sophie’s perspective. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen from 2022, a story to be experienced, one that touches on universal facets of childhood and parenthood – yet another film about how we can never truly understand our parents – while also telling a very specific story about two very realistic and memorable characters.

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→ January 16, 2023
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Argentina, 1985.

Argentina, 1985 was the surprise winner of this year’s Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, beating out Decision to Leave and RRR, perhaps because of the power of its story. It’s a tight, well-acted film, a great antidote if your palate was still seared by last year’s bombastic The Trial of the Chicago 7, but in the end it also has a limited ceiling – this is a courtroom drama, and no matter how important the subject is, that genre constrains any film, show, or book. (It’s streaming free on Amazon Prime.)

Argentina, 1985 is based on the real-life case in a civilian court where Argentina’s democratically elected government tried several leaders of the military dictatorship that collapsed in 1983 after the country’s humiliating defeat in the Falkland Islands War. That dictatorship ruled for seven years and murdered thousands of its own citizens as part of the Dirty War against supposed leftists, with the total number of people the government ‘disappeared’ estimated between 9,000 and 30,000. In 1985, the government’s truth and reconciliation commission wanted to bring some of the leaders of the dictatorship to justice, in a case that became known as the Trial of the Juntas. The military tribunal kicked the case over to civil court, which meant that the state had to find lawyers willing to try a case that would likely see their families threatened and perhaps their careers ended if they failed. It fell to prosecutor Julio César Strassera (Ricardo Darín) to assemble a team of lawyers, with the aid of the young and inexperienced attorney Luis Moreno Ocampo (Peter Lanzani), capable of winning the case, which they did by finding survivors of the regime’s campaign of imprisonment and torture who were willing to risk their lives by coming forward and testifying against the junta’s leaders.

As courtroom dramas go, Argentina, 1985 hits the right notes without resorting to excessive sentimentality or big gotcha moments. This isn’t a police procedural where a surprise witness or a clever objection turns the case on its head, or some event outside the courtroom derails the case; it follows a clear, mostly linear narrative, where Strassera and Ocampo assemble a misfit group of extremely young attorneys who have very little baggage related to the case and are willing to work long hours trying to track victims down and then convince them to talk. It’s a rousing story given how they put that team together, and how, if there were such a thing, the oddsmakers would have given them a snowball’s chance of winning based on their resumés. We don’t get to know any of the lawyers in any depth, seeing a little of Strassera’s home life and tension with his bosses, and the other participants in the trial are ciphers – which is fine for a courtroom drama, again, but limits how far the film can go. Nobody needs to humanize a murderous dictator, but it’s also a less interesting film when the people on trial are irredeemable monsters.

The power of Argentina, 1985 comes more in the testimonies themselves than anything about the characters or even the overall narrative, since the convictions are part of history and would certainly be known to anyone watching the film in its native country. And these are the survivors, with no one there to speak for the dead and disappeared, a common problem for such reconciliation attempts in the wake of dictatorships and genocides. The stories are horrible enough to carry the heart of the film, and give it weight that I would imagine helped it with the Golden Globe and a slew of other honors so far in the 2022 awards cycle, as well as making the 15-film shortlist for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Film. I couldn’t vote for this over Decision to Leave, though, which also made the Oscars shortlist and seems very likely to earn a nomination for the award. Argentina, 1985 is about as well-made as a film can be, with solid lead performances and a tight script that even injects some levity into a difficult story. It just can’t be a truly great film within the confines of its genre and subject.

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