→ March 19, 2025
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So Much Blue.

So Much Blue may be one of Perceval Everett’s lesser-known novels, as it hasn’t received a film adaptation or any major awards, but I suspect also because it doesn’t have any of the speculative or fantastical elements of his more famous or popular works. His prose and characterization translate beautifully to the realist mode, which isn’t surprising, and in this pensive work about a middle-aged painter dealing with the weight of memories and past failings Everett gives the deepest exploration of a character I’ve seen in the four of his novels I’ve read.

Kevin Pace is a painter, married with two kids, living what would appear from the outside to be a comfortable upper-middle-class life with the usual problems you’d expect to find in a story about a suburban family. Everett intertwines that present-day narrative, which includes a secret painting that Pace won’t show anybody, not even his wife or his best friend, with two narratives from the past: one from 1979 where he joins his best friend on a dangerous trip to El Salvador to try to find and rescue the best friend’s ne’er-do-well brother, and one from ten years before the present day where Kevin had an affair with a French painter about twenty years his junior.

The 1979 narrative is by far the most compelling of the three, as it’s part thriller, part buddy comedy, and is driven by the uncertainty of how it’s going to turn out beyond knowing that Kevin and his best friend survived. Yet the depiction of the affair is the most interesting because Everett avoids the two typical ways of writing about that topic: he doesn’t judge Kevin’s actions, and he certainly doesn’t condone them, but lets the character’s words and behaviors speak for him and the reader to do the judging. Kevin knows he’s doing something terrible, but he does it anyway and has to live with the consequences.

Those consequences are the real theme of the novel – what happened in 1979, where a ridiculous, foolhardy endeavor that starts with good intentions and eccentric characters ends in violence, and what happened in Paris both weigh tremendously on Kevin, with their impact threatening to unravel his marriage and family and to stall his career. The present-day narrative also has a significant event that forces Kevin to make a choice, and he makes the wrong one, again, even though in that case it seems like the right decision at the time, after which he has several chances to set things right and can’t bring himself to do it, a subplot that especially resonated with me.

Everett’s development of Kevin as a character across three time periods, each of which sees him change and grow in some sense (even if it’s not always positive), shows a level of craft I at least hadn’t seen in the other three novels of his I’ve read. There’s a depth of understanding of Kevin as a person, as a man, as a middle-aged man, and as a very flawed man who is still reeling from events that happened thirty years earlier, that rivals the character development in just about any contemporary novel I can recall. Whether you agree with Kevin’s choices, including the decisions he makes to keep things secret, or his own assessment of those choices, Everett’s depiction of all of Kevin shows incredible insight into the character and how people think and feel about complex situations.

As you might expect from the title, color is a recurring motif and symbol in So Much Blue, with that particular color coming up repeatedly, as the secret painting in Kevin’s shed contains various shades of blue, and he refers more than once to the fact that traditional Chinese had just one word for blue and for green. Blue itself can carry multiple meanings in art, from the  most obvious one, depression (is Kevin depressed? Is he hiding his depression from his family?), to the way painters use blue to represent distance, using more blue to show that buildings or other objects are farther from the viewer. Blue is also the color we associate with the unattainable; the sky is blue from the ground, but when we ascend a mountain or a building, we don’t get any closer to the blue, as it remains beyond our reach. The ocean is blue from a distance, but when we’re in the water, it’s clear. Kevin expresses an ambivalent relationship with the color even as he fills his hidden painting with it; is that a representation of his unfulfilled desires, a depression he wants to keep locked away, or his attempt to create distance between himself and the things he doesn’t want to remember?

Everett is approaching Ann Patchett as my favorite living American writer. She crafts incredible stories with beautiful, lyrical prose, filling the pages with believable and three-dimensional characters, while he ranges from the wildly inventive to biting satire to compassionate character study. It’s hard to believe all four of the books of his I’ve read all came from the same mind. He’s some sort of wizard.

Next up: I just finished Cho Nam-ju’s Saha and started Antonio Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the End of Physics.

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→ March 18, 2025
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September 5.

September 5 takes the story of the murder of most of the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics and tells it from a novel perspective: that of the ABC producers and staff broadcasting the Olympics to the United States audience. The shift makes it as much a story about journalism and about the way people react to crises in real time as a story about the attack itself, allowing the film to hold the tragedy at arm’s length without trivializing its impact, and the result is a true thriller even if you already know all of the details of the ending. (It’s streaming free on Paramount+ or you can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

We begin behind the scenes with what seems like another day of coverage, watching Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) decide to focus on the despair of one of the losing swimmers after one of Mark Spitz’s victories, along with a mundane argument about what events to air between Arledge and two of his lieutenants in the control room, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Baden (Ben Chaplin). Not long afterwards, several other staffers, including the translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch), think they hear gunshots, and soon afterwards the group learns of the attack and the first killings, leading to a series of decisions of how to cover the events – doing so with a staff and crew there to cover sports, not breaking news, and certainly not this kind of crisis – and how best to leverage their position to benefit ABC. The producers even resort to some subterfuge to get a staffer inside the police perimeter, stare down German authorities who storm the control room to shut them down, and try to learn the fate of the hostages – with the last leading to the one big mistake that the decision-makers make over the course of crisis.

I’m a sucker for a good journalism story, so September 5 is catnip to me, and this movie does an excellent job of keeping the tension ratcheted up to 10 while barely leaving the control room, driving almost everything through dialogue. The film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Oscars, and that’s its greatest strength – there’s no fat on this script, and even though the crisis unfolds outside of the room where our characters are, the film doesn’t lose the claustrophobic sense that comes with a movie in a single, enclosed setting. It’s also unusual in the way it creates so much tension through a story where none of the named characters are ever in any sort of peril

The script doesn’t quite pay sufficient attention to the human tragedy that drives the drama in the control room, however. There are some mentions here and there of individual athletes, and a discussion of the possibility that someone might be shot live on camera where his parents might see it, but by and large this is a movie about the people in the control room. You may argue it’s just not that kind of movie, or that its lean running time – which is just right for the story it’s telling – requires it to skimp on treating the tragedy as such; I think the script could have done more to humanize the events at its core, and in the process giving its characters more empathy in the moment, unless Arledge and Mason and Bader were all just extremely callous men in real life. (Marianne is the one member of the big four characters who isn’t based on a real person, but Benesch – who was outstanding in 2023’s The Teachers’ Lounge – is so damn good here that I didn’t mind the fabrication one bit.)

The three actors portraying the three real-life ABC employees are all solid, but Magaro – who was excellent in a secondary role in Past Lives and as a mentally ill man in Showing Up – is the standout here, in part because his character has some more complexity and ends up confronting the biggest decision of the day, the one that happens to go wrong for the group. Sarsgaard and Chaplin are solid, but their characters can seem inert by comparison to Mason or Marianne, who show more emotion and seem more attuned to the human tragedy taking place just a few hundred yards away.

This movie is just too much in my wheelhouse for me to dislike it; I was riveted for most of its 90 minutes, once the attack begins and the movie just kicks into drive, never downshifting until the last few minutes. I can recognize its flaws with some separation from watching it, but I was probably as engrossed in September 5 as I’ve been in any movie I’ve watched from the 2024 cycle. It’s so well-told and well-paced that I never had the mental bandwidth to consider what might be missing.

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→ March 17, 2025
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Interior Chinatown.

Interior Chinatown is one of the most inventive, unusual, and funny books I’ve read in the last several years. It’s as if Percival Everett wrote a book about the Chinese immigrant experience in America, while satirizing Hollywood’s special sort of pigeonholing discrimination for people of east Asian descent along the way.

Charles Yu writes Interior Chinatown as if it’s a film treatment – all of the daily occurrences in our protagonist Willis Wu’s life come through the lens of a police procedural called Black and White, starring a Black male cop and a white female cop who have the usual not-witty banter and unaddressed sexual tension. (It reminded me of those abysmal Bacardi commercials about a pair of spies or whatever they were named … Bacardi and Cola. I’ll let you guess which was the Black guy.) Willis is a Generic Asian Male who usually plays Background Oriental Male, but hopes to work his way up to Kung Fu Guy some day, a status achieved by his father, who is now a sad, drunken Old Asian Man. The lives of Willis and his neighbors in Chinatown are split between the way they act when they’re on screen, falling into accented English and stereotypical behaviors, and when they’re off it, both of which constrain their futures, seen through Willis’s parents. The one exception is Willis’s Older Brother, who was on his way to becoming Kung Fu Guy but left Chinatown to go to law school, disappearing from the scene literally and figuratively. Willis eventually reaches a breaking point with this life and demands a bigger role, which he gets, but when he’s killed on the show he has to take 45 days off before he can work again – which puts a damper on his budding romance with another character on the show, Karen Lee.

The whole endeavor is gloriously absurd and Yu never breaks with the conceit. Everything is theater, and written as such, right down to the font choice and the equivalent of chapter and section breaks. The dialogue from the show is spot-on with the nonsense we see on copaganda network shows, and even the Black actor/character points out that he’s pigeonholed in his own way. (Yu could have kept going – south Asian characters, Muslim or Arab characters, and so on, each placed in their own little buckets by oh-so-progressive Hollywood.) It’s quite a trick to make racism and discrimination funny; Everett has done it, Paul Beatty did it beautifully in The Sellout, but very few have pulled it off like Yu does here.

Yu uses the device of the TV show as a metaphor for the immigrant experience, and there’s a layer here I know I can’t fully appreciate as someone who’s not Asian and whose parents were born and raised in the U.S. The idea of parents giving up something of themselves to try to make their kids’ lives better, and the kids striving to do better than their parents did in a system that doesn’t want to let them do so, come through in the depiction of the TV show that won’t even consider Asian-Americans as anything but background players.

There’s also a hazard in finding a credible way to conclude any story this inventive, something Everett hasn’t always done (The Trees comes to mind), but Yu pulls it off by both talking fast and switching venues for the big finish. The whole novel moves quickly, as Yu’s prose is light and there’s a lot of white space on the pages anyway, but once we get to the last two sections things start flying even with more exposition from Willis and Older Brother. I bought it, at least, and could see how Yu might map what happens in the book to some of the more positive stories of second-generation immigrants here. I can certainly see why this won the National Book Award in 2020 – it’s a tremendous book and one that says something important and new about American life.

(I haven’t seen the TV series adaptation, which premiered on Hulu a few months ago.)

Next up: Speaking of Percival Everett, I just finished his 2017 novel So Much Blue and am now on Cho Nam-Joo’s Saha.

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→ March 12, 2025
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Sing Sing.

Sing Sing has no business being as good as it is. This movie sounds like it’s going to have more sap than a pine forest, and instead of devolving into sentimental claptrap, it tells its story in an understated way that doesn’t try to tell the audience how to feel or what to expect. Of all of the movies I’ve seen from the 2024 cycle so far, it’s not the best movie or close to it, but it’s the one I’m going to recommend to the most people, because it should have very broad appeal, and has the second virtue of actually being good, even if it’s a little superficial in the telling. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The story is set at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, and follows several incarcerated men who are participating in the prison’s Rehabiliation Through the Arts program, which holds workshops in several performing and writing arts in prisons across New York state. Divine G (Colman Domingo) is a fervent participant both as an actor and a playwright, and becomes the de facto leader of the acting troupe, which works with coach Brent Buell (Paul Raci) to stage productions every six months or so. The group’s dynamic is upset when another longtime inmate, Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (playing himself), joins the classes and brings a new perspective while also learning to deal with his own frustrations and anger, while also becoming frenemies with Divine G. The film follows the dance between the two men as they try to find ways to first work with and then help each other, all as the group works to put on a show and both men try to gain their freedom through a difficult legal process.

The story was co-written by Divine G and Maclin, along with the two screenwriters who eventually wrote the script, with all four listed when they received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. (It’s based on an Esquire story by John Richardson called “The Sing Sing Follies.”) Once you know that, it’s hard to see the film in any other light – this is a pretty remarkable piece of storycraft that gets at some real character development from both of the two leads, more than you find in many movies or even novels. Both Divine Eye and Divine G have clear story arcs, and the interplay between their characters and their characters’ stories is the beating heart of the film. Domingo’s superb as always, and more than deserved his Oscar nomination, but Maclin’s performance is excellent as well – even if he’s playing a version of himself.

The main problem with Sing Sing is that it’s almost too positive. The story focuses on the theater program and shows very little of prison life outside of it. There are some scenes in the prison yard that depict some illicit business, but that’s about all we get. The inmates in the theater program mostly seem to have significant freedom within the prison, even in how they dress, and the audience only hears about the struggles of incarceration, rather than seeing any of it. That’s part of why it’s a feel-good movie – you’ll feel good about how successful and meaningful the arts program is, and you won’t feel bad about how terrible it is to be locked up for years, even more so for a crime you didn’t commit. Prison just doesn’t look that bad in Sing Sing and I don’t think that’s accurate.

Nearly all of the cast here comprises formerly incarcerated men who came through the program; Domingo, Raci, and theater actor Sean San José are the only exceptions I see. Most are playing themselves, but it’s still remarkable how easy these performances are – there was never a point where it was clear that someone wasn’t a professional actor, even the many cameos (including the real Divine G, who appears early in the film as another inmate who asks Domingo for an autograph). It adds to the verisimilitude of the film, of course, but also underscores the point about the value of the program, which I interpreted as an argument for the value of many kinds of social-development programs for incarcerated people. These programs, like the one in Daughters as well, reduce recidivism, which is supposed to be the goal of most incarcerations (rather than punishment, or vengeance, which is what our carceral system is really about). We’re seeing men – there are almost no lines spoken by women in the film at all – who went through the RTA program, got out, and haven’t returned. Their very presence on the screen is a feel-good story. The script probably should have delved a little more into the horrors of life on the inside, but that would have been a very different movie, too. I’m flummoxed that this wasn’t a bigger hit – it only made about $2.5 million at the U.S. box office, coming out last summer, then returning to theaters when it started earning award nominations. Critics loved it, and loved Domingo’s performance. The ending is upbeat, but not saccharine. CODA was a critical success and Best Picture winner with less. I’m hoping Sing Sing finds its audience now that it’s streaming, because it deserved more than it got.

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→ March 6, 2025
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Nickel Boys.

Nickel Boys, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s outstanding, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys,  is a daring experiment that tells the stories of its two protagonists in first-person perspective, giving the viewer the unsettling feeling of being in the abuse-ridden Nickel “Academy” for Boys. It’s easily one of the best films of 2024, earning just two Oscar nominations (Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay), although the script’s fidelity to the novel ended up blunting some of the suspense of the film for me.  (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc., or watch it free on that MGM+ thing nobody has.)

Nickel Boys starts by following Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a bookish young Black man in Florida in 1962 who ends up arrested as an accomplice to a theft he didn’t commit and is sent to a segregated reform school, based on the real-life Florida School for Boys, which was only closed in 2009 after decades of reports of abuse, rape, and murder of the children imprisoned there. Elwood becomes an easy target for some of the bigger, tougher boys there until a longer-term inmate, Turner (Brandon Wilson), comes to his aid, and the two become friends. When the pair see all of the corruption and violence going on behind the scenes, they hatch a plot to try to get the abusive school leader removed from power. Scenes from 1988 are interspersed through the film, showing Elwood, now an adult living in New York City, running his own moving business, eventually running into a former classmate from the institution and hearing how many others have died or fallen into substance abuse since they were “graduated.” We also see Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in the beginning of the movie before Elwood’s arrest, in her attempts to visit him and use a lawyer to get him released, and in some of Elwood’s flashbacks to his life before Nickel.

This is the first full-length feature from director and co-screenwriter RaMell Ross, who directed the Oscar-nominated short Hale County This Morning, This Evening in 2018, making it even more impressive that he  chose to film it in first-person perspective, and to do so from the viewpoint of two different characters. There are several scenes we see twice, which naturally changes the way we interpret the events we’re watching, and even in scenes we see once the shift in perspective can be disorienting – deliberately so, mimicking the sense that the student-inmates must have had in an environment where punishment, including getting “disappeared,” could be arbitrary and capricious. The intense focus on only what Elwood or Turner could see means that the audience’s understanding of how brutal and corrupt the school leadership was is entirely defined by the boys’ understanding of the same. We might suspect it more than they do, of course, but the evidence comes to us through their eyes, so that their disbelief – especially that people in positions of authority could so blatantly ignore the rules and act unfairly – is more palpable.

That this film missed out on the Best Cinematography category is the great snub and mystery of this year’s Oscars; I understand the movie wasn’t that widely seen, but it got a Best Picture nomination, so enough people saw and appreciated it for it to land one of those spots even over some films that (I think) were seen as more likely to make the cut. The cinematography in this movie is everything; it is the defining feature of the film, and it elevates a story that was already fantastic to another level, making this one of the very best movies of the year. The two leads give excellent performances, but I can see the argument that both are too understated to become awards fodder, not when they were competing against impersonations and dancing lawyers and the like.

Nickel Boys is ultimately an experience, or a movie to be experienced, something that I seldom saw in this movie cycle; Anora, which won Best Picture and a slew of other honors, is one of the others, and I’d say the underrated A Real Pain is as well. All three movies draw you into their stories in the early moments and never break the spell until the final scene or two. I was at a slight disadvantage here, because I read the novel and remembered the twist, so the gut-punch moment that comes late in the film didn’t land the same way with me. That’s not a criticism of the film, but a comment on the particular experience I had in watching it. However, Ross made an editorial choice at the very end, after the resolution of the main narrative, showing some real-life images and footage that, unfortunately, did break the spell for me before we hit the credits. It was the only misstep for me in what was otherwise a superb film and tremendous directorial debut, one that I hope is a harbinger of more great work to come.

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→ February 27, 2025
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Memoir of a Snail.

Memoir of a Snail is almost too much of a bad thing: Its protagonist, Grace, suffers tragedy after tragedy in her life, confirming her fears about the world to the point that she’s left entirely alone as the film begins and she starts telling her life story. It is so beautifully told, however, that it holds itself together just long enough to get to the finish line, where it all comes together in an ending that brings hope with just a touch of sentiment. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Memoir of a Snail is the second full-length film from writer/director Adam Elliot, who apparently has a reputation for these sort of bleak stories. It follows Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook), who we see as an adult at the beginning, watching her closest friend, Pinky (Jacki Weaver), die of the most old age. Grace then steps outside to the garden, where she releases one of her pet snails, Sylvia, and then begins to tell the sad story of her sad life, from her birth with a cleft lip, for which other kids make fun of her for years, to when she and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) became orphans – their mother died giving birth to them – and then their miserable lives in separate foster families. Gilbert ends up with an evangelical Christian family near Perth, where he’s forced to work on the family orchard and to speak in tongues while praying, while Grace ends up with a pair of nudist hippies who eventually just abandon her. Her life gets worse and worse, other than her friendship with the eccentric Pinky, who buried two husbands in tragicomic circumstances, but has a devil-may-care approach to life and is determined to have a good time.

Pinky’s death is, naturally, the spur that Grace needs to leave the house and go live her life for the first time, although how we get there is part of the magic of the film. There’s probably one tragedy too many – one of them definitely had me shout “enough!” at the screen – but there is so much exploration of Grace’s feelings that she ends up one of the best-developed characters in any film this year, live-action or animated. It also means that when she gets a happier ending, the film has earned it, even the one slightly implausible bit (which you will probably see coming) that makes her happiest of all of her new fortunes.

Elliotuses stop-motion animation in his films, with a style that naturally calls to mind Tim Burton’s work in the genre, with elements of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey in his characters’ appearances. They’re cute in a grotesque sort of way, especially Grace with her ridiculous snail-hat (it has two ping-pong balls on wires or pipe cleaners, painted as eyes) and Gilbert with his Harry Potter-ish hair. They’re weird, and that makes it easy to see why they’d be bullied and ostracized, and why they’d feel alone and scared of the greater world. It’s also easy to empathize with them, and root for them in their Dickensian circumstances, because he depicts them as real enough to keep them from becoming pathetic. Snook’s voice performance is also fantastic, so much so that she won Best Lead Actress at this year’s AACTA Awards, the Australian equivalent to the Oscars, with Weaver winning for Best Supporting Actress, both over actors who appeared in live-action films.

Best Animated Feature is the only category in this year’s Oscars where I’ve seen all of the nominees, and that’ll probably still be true on Sunday night. I expect Flow to win, as it won the Golden Globe and won the Best Animated Feature – Independent award at the Annies (the most significant awards for animated productions), but this isn’t even a close call; Flow is fine, but has no dialogue and very little story, just some beautiful animation work and a bunch of animals who turn out to secretly be civil engineers. It would be my second choice, with The Wild Robot third, Inside Out 2 second, and the very disappointing Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl last, because it just wasn’t funny at all.

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→ February 26, 2025
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James.

Percival Everett has been writing novels for over twenty years, but he’s having a moment right now: his 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction, which won its screenwriter Cord Jefferson an Academy Award; and his latest novel, James, won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction while making the Booker Prize shortlist. (It should have won that too, but lost to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.) James retells the story of Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s novel, from Jim’s perspective, completely reimagining the character and most of the narrative, in a book that is far more of an adventure than the novel that inspired it while also giving its protagonist far more humanity than his creator ever did.

James narrates Everett’s novel, and does so in an erudite voice that, of course, has nothing to do with the slave dialect the character uses in Twain’s work. In this novel’s universe, slaves know how to speak as well as or better than their white tormentors, but they feign all manner of ignorance to make the whites feel better about themselves and thus try to improve their own odds of survival. The plot starts out on the same track as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with Huck faking his own death to escape his abusive father while James runs away to avoid being sold and separated from his wife Sadie and daughter Lizzie. (Twain mentioned Jim’s wife, but didn’t name her; Everett is following the convention of other writers who’ve used these characters.) The two flee upriver, with James seeing the corpse of Huck’s father but not telling the boy, Huck witnessing the murderous feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, and the two encountering the con men who call themselves the King and the Duke and who eventually sell James to a local slave owner.

Everett fills in the blanks in Twain’s novel by following James rather than Huck, giving James’ dialogue with other slaves – all in proper English, generally more proper than what the white characters use – and his own inner monologue on his life and on philosophy. He’s visited in dreams by Locke and (I think) Rousseau, reads Voltaire and John Stuart Mill, and eventually gets a hold of a pencil at great cost so he can begin to write some of his thoughts on paper. James’s narrative diverges from the original when the King and Duke briefly leave him with a third man, who sells him to a traveling minstrel group, where James meets a man named Norman and escapes with him while looking for Huck, who’s still with the two bandits. This arc returns James to their home in the end, without an appearance from Tom Sawyer, and leads to a conclusion that is far more satisfying than Twain’s, if less realistic.

James, or Jim in Twain’s work, is just not a well-developed character in the original stories, even as Twain wrote him in a far more sympathetic manner than just about any of his contemporaries did when writing of slaves or even of Black people in general. Everett’s James is intelligent, sure, but the difference is that he is whole: he has fully-developed thoughts and ideas, values, a sense of justice, empathy for others, and a desire for even a little agency over his own life. It stands above nearly every other continuation or adaptation of a famous novel I’ve ever encountered, with the possible exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s similar retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic – but Everett’s novel is angrier and wittier and much better paced than Rhys’s.

Everett also mimics Twain’s use of the picaresque format both for its thrilling elements and its satirical ones, although here the satire is subtler than it is in some of Everett’s other works, like the absurdist Dr. No or the violent fantasy of The Trees, the other two of his novels I’ve read so far. James reads like Everett was trying to stay authentic to Twain’s work as much as possible until he veered away from the plot in the last third of his own novel – and it works, because of the familiarity of the original (one of the few novels I’ve read twice, and the only one I had to read in high school and in college) and because of how well-structured it was in the first place. Everett is brilliant and wildly imaginative, so his restraint here isn’t just impressive, but makes the whole work more powerful in the end. I have read very few works of great literature with this sort of haste, because the story and the character are so compelling I never wanted to put the book down.

Next up: Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day, winner of the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ February 24, 2025
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The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Shot in secret in 2022-23, The Seed of the Sacred Fig was banned in Iran and its release abroad led to arrest warrants for the director, Mohammad Rasoulof, after which he and most members of the cast fled the country. It’s a nearly three-hour epic film that starts out as a political drama, morphs into a sort of psychological thriller, and ends up as almost an action film, as we follow a single family during the 2022-23 protests against the theocratic regime, unrest that takes this apparently quiet household and shatters its peace and the fragile mind of its patriarch.

Iman was a low-level investigator for the Islamic dictatorship that has ruled Iran since 1979, and as the film begins he’s been promoted to a more senior investigative role, one that will pay better, grant him better housing, and that also gives him a gun, invoking Chekhov’s rule. His family doesn’t know what he does for work at first, but he tells his wife Najmeh, and the two of them then have to explain to their two daughters, Rezvan and Sana, that they must be particularly rigid about following the laws, including wearing the hijab (which was at the root of the protests) and avoiding posting pictures of themselves on social media. Rezvan’s friend ends up injured by the police while the two are leaving a university building, and Najmeh helps patch the friend up briefly while getting her out of the house before Iman knows she’s been there, but this is just the undercard for what’s to come: The gun goes missing, and Iman assumes the culprit is in the house. That shifts the entire tenor of the movie to one that looked outward to the brutal police response to the protestors into one that looks inward at how Iman’s new job, where he is rubber-stamping dozens if not hundreds of executions per day, has warped his inner self and made him into a tyrant who will gladly repress the women under his command at the slightest provocation.

The fact that it was filmed in secret only underscores the movie’s broader themes of how authoritarian regimes destroy the fundamental bonds that hold us together, with family above all: They turn neighbors against neighbors and family members against family members. Iman has no reason to distrust or suspect his compliant wife or his daughters of anything until the government sends him home with a metaphor. He and his wife are both true believers in the regime and in their Islamic faith, while their daughters, who have access to social media and can see that the government is lying to them, want the same kind of freedoms that the protestors are fighting for. The conflict in their home mirrors the conflict in Iranian society, and when Iman goes around the bend and begins terrorizing his family after their address and his picture appear online, he resorts to increasingly harsh and inhumane tactics to force their obedience, with somewhat predictable consequences for everyone. The final moment and image are further loaded with symbolism, as the hollow foundation beneath one character’s feet gives way, arguing just how tenuous the power of a dictatorship truly is.

This is easily one of the best films I’ve seen from 2024, even if it drags a little in the final third, as Rasoulof seems less adept at managing the action sequences than he is at the psychological thiller bits; there’s a long section where several characters are chasing each other through some ruins, but you could easily put the Benny Hill music over it and it would work just fine. The shift from the macro lens to the micro one is just brilliant, as the script sets up the context with real footage from the protests, making especial note of just how much the violence came down against women (in a country that already is one of the most repressive in the world when it comes to women’s rights), before moving to the family drama, where it becomes increasingly clear that these three women are just serfs who exist at the whim of their father. It’s a brutal and unstinting look at Iranian society; no wonder the authoritarian clerics didn’t like it.

(I don’t think this film has a chance at the Best International Feature Film Oscar this year, for which it’s one of the five nominees, as I’m Still Here is also in that category and has a Best Picture nod as well, which probably means it will end up taking the spot everyone assumed would go to Emilia Perez before that film’s implosion in the last few weeks.)

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→ February 18, 2025
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Hard Truths.

Mike Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets & Lies was a breakthrough for the British writer-director, earning him Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay along with nods for both of its leads, including a then relatively unknown actress named Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The two reunited last year for Hard Truths, a film delayed several years by the pandemic, this time putting Jean-Baptiste in the lead role as quite possibly the literal Worst Person in the World in a story that just barely scratches the surface of why she is who she is. (You can rent Hard Truths now on Apple and Amazon.)

Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy Deacon, who we first see as she is obsessively cleaning her house, taking time out to scold and denigrate both her 22-year-old son Moses and her husband Curtley, both of whom seem unable or unwilling to defend themselves against her verbal onslaughts. She takes the same misanthropic attitude into the world, starting fights with a furniture store employee, other patrons in a grocery store, and, eventually, her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin). Chantelle first appears to be the opposite of Pansy, as she’s bubbly, outgoing, and trying to move forward where Pansy complains about likely imagined health ailments and uses them as excuses not to leave the house. Even Chantelle’s household is livelier; her two adult daughters live with her, and we see them acting silly and loving, where Pansy’s house is sterile and ruled by fear.

Most descriptions of Hard Truths describe Pansy as ‘depressed,’ but that’s not how the film depicts her; there is, at least, a hell of a lot more going on here. The script gives all sorts of little clues that maybe she’s anxious, or has a phobia of germs or dirt, or has OCD, or something else, but avoids any sort of diagnosis or other facile explanations for how she acts: The point is that this is who she is, not what a piece of paper might say. The only tangible cause we learn that might explain some of Pansy’s behavior is that her mother, Pearl, died five years earlier, and Pansy has still not processed or faced this. She has unresolved feelings about how her mother treated Chantelle differently, and the role Pansy was forced to play in the family once their father died. She fights Chantelle over the latter’s annual visit to their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day, using it as an excuse to belittle her son and husband for failing to acknowledge her on the holiday (which may not even be true, as it’s clear she’s not a reliable narrator). She’s also beset by nightmares that are never explained, another subtle hint that there is much going on below the surface that we can’t see – as the bromide goes, you never know what someone else is going through. It doesn’t excuse the vicious things she says to strangers or family members, or the way she responds to innocuous comments as if they are hidden insults or provocations for fights, but it underscores that even a seemingly irredeemable, one-note character may be more complex than they first appear to be.

Hard Truths is more a character study than a traditional film, as the narrative is slight and there is very little resolution for anyone, certainly not for Pansy. Chantelle and her daughters have their own struggles and obstacles – we see slivers of everyone’s lives even though Pansy’s life is the dominant plot strand – but they muddle through, and they’ll likely continue to do so. Both of her daughters have pretty lousy days at work when we first see them, yet when they meet for drinks afterwards, neither lets the setbacks affect them – perhaps confiding too little in a sibling, a person who is likely to accept you for who you are and will probably take your side in any conflict, but better than taking their anger over injustice in one area and lashing out at someone else as a result. The result of the focus on character is that this is a movie where very little happens, so the main cathartic moment is expository rather than explanatory. That won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, whether you want Pansy to get her comeuppance (she doesn’t) or turn around and apologize to everyone (also, she doesn’t) or realize that the real treasure was the friends she made along the way (I’ll let you figure that one out). It’s such a well-written story of unpleasantness, with Jean-Baptiste – who really should have earned a Best Actress nod over Karla Sofía Gascón – giving such an intense portrayal of a woman whose inner spring is so tightly wound inside that the slightest touch makes her explode, that the meager plot didn’t matter much to me in the end, even if I perhaps wanted a little more in the resolution.

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→ January 7, 2025
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Kneecap.

Kneecap tells the story, loosely, of the founding of the popular Irish-language rap trio of the same name, with the three members playing themselves. It’s mostly fictional and entirely hilarious. (It’s on Netflix in the U.S.)

The band Kneecap has risen to significant prominence in both their native Northern Ireland and in Ireland over the last decade, but this biopic blends truth with fiction, although writer/director Rich Peppiatt told NPR that the wilder stuff is the truth and the “mundane” stuff is fabricated. The two MCs switch between Irish and English, between pro-Republican and pro-Irish language activism and rhymes about drinking and drugs, rapping over beats that draw more from the golden age of hip-hop than anything in the last 30 years of American rap. Their second album, Fine Art, featured guest spots from Fontaines D.C. vocalist Grian Chatten and British rapper Jelani Blackman, and the song “3CAG” became a top 10 hit on Ireland’s pop chart.

Kneecap’s script creates some structure around the group, from member Naoise’s father being an ex-Republican paramilitary who faked his death to avoid arrest to a story about how the two rappers connected with their schoolteacher DJ. The throughline, and the real heart of the film, is the rapid, organic rise in popularity that came from their live gigs and a protest campaign that got one of their first songs played on an Irish-language radio station across the island. It has some of the trappings of classic up-from-obscurity music biopics, but avoids many of the tropes of the genre – the drug use is almost entirely comic, rather than leading to some sort of tragedy or downfall; the band doesn’t break up only to come together at the end; there’s a love interest that doesn’t divide the band or otherwise derail them.

The trio’s ascent has been rapid enough that the screenplay instead layers on a political story, from Naoise’s father, played with brilliant understatement by Michael Fassbender, to a Northern Irish police officer who believes they’re dangerous activists, to run-ins with a group called Radical Republicans Against Drugs. Nearly all of this is made up for the movie, and it’s just about all funny even when there’s a serious subtext like the suppression of native Irish language and culture in British-ruled Ulster. The three members of Kneecap are natural performers, to the point where I thought for much of the film that DJ Próvaí was being played by an actor when he’s just playing himself.

The Irish Film & Television Academy submitted Kneecap as the country’s entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, and it made the December shortlist of 15 titles. Only one Irish film has ever made the final list of nominations, 2022’s The Quiet Girl (which is fantastic), but Kneecap appears to have a real shot to become the second, and I’d be thrilled if it means more people seek this movie out. It’s a riot, and it’s something novel – it’s not a straight biopic, it’s not a parody or a mockumentary, and it’s about a specific culture that was mostly new to me (I mean, I’ve watched Derry Girls). And because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, or seriously at all, the underlying theme of pride in one’s culture and language is far more effective than it would have been if they’d played it straight. It’s not going to beat Emilia Perez for the Oscar, but it’s a way better film.

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