→ January 3, 2019
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Sorry to Bother You.

Sorry to Bother You (now streaming on Hulu), Boots Riley’s debut as director and writer, is a total mess of a film. It’s not a mess in the sense of, say, The Room, which is legendary for its badness, but in the sense that Riley tried to do way too much in a single 110-minute picture, packing in enough thematic material for three movies, attempting to shock the audience at least one time too often, and, when the film starts to go off the rails in the final third, steering hard into the skid when he needed to correct his course. The result is a film with high-concept ambitions that can’t achieve any of them.

Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out) stars as Cassius “Cash” Green, an unemployed Oakland resident who lives in his uncle’s garage and lands a very low-end job with a telemarketing firm, RegalView, at the very beginning of the film. After a bunch of prologue that doesn’t entirely matter, he learns from an older colleague (Danny Glover) that he’ll sell more stuff if he uses his “white voice,” which Cash eventually finds almost by accident (voiced by David Cross). He becomes a star, is promoted to a “power caller,” and goes upstairs to the VIP level at the telemarketing firm, where he finds himself selling some ethically dubious products services. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson, whose earrings are the film’s best running gag) is a progressive artist and part-time agitator who works with a leftist-anarchist group The Left Eye to protest a new company, WorryFree, that promises workers employment, housing, and food for life if they agree to work for the company for life without any salary. And Cash’s colleague Squeeze (Steven Yeun, who had a pretty good 2018 for himself) is actually a union organizer who leads work actions at RegalView. There’s more, but you’re probably getting the idea by now.

Riley is trying to take out a bunch of rabbits with a machine gun here, with entirely predictable results. Unfettered capitalism might be his main target, but he’s also hitting materialism, conscious and subconscious racism, cultural appropriation, worker exploitation, police brutality, police militarization, the dumbing down of American culture, genetic engineering, and a lot more. No film could adequately address that many disparate issues in two hours without turning into a scattershot mess; Terry Gilliam’s Brazil tried to hit fewer than half as many concepts, and was still incomprehensible to large portions of the audience.

One of the keys to effective satire is focus – the satirist picks one target, maybe two at most, and then drills deeply enough to take something essential to that target and use that facet against it. Riley goes the other way here, skimming off the top, and thus relying on superficial depictions of his targets to lampoon them by simply making them more ridiculous. The “white voice” gimmick is the best deployment of this technique, and to Riley’s credit, he doesn’t overuse it – only four characters get white voices at all, and only two get them for more than one scene, while it becomes unremarkable for Cash and his boss upstairs, Mr. _____, after a few conversations. That sort of restraint is lacking elsewhere in the film; the most popular show in the alternate universe of Sorry to Bother You, a game show called “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me!,” appears repeatedly without ever saying anything that wasn’t apparent the first time Cash and Squeeze watch it on TV at a bar after work.

The film also has one of the worst endings of any movie I’ve seen from 2018; The Wife‘s was worse, since it was the most predictable, and First Reformed‘s was more of a copout, whereas Riley just decides to go full batshit with his conclusion here, introducing a new plot element in the final third of the movie and making it essential to the resolution. (He also loses five points for casting Armie Hammer, who might know his claret from his Beaujolais but is not and will probably never be a good actor, as the CEO of WorryFree.) Riley doesn’t just go over the top in his conclusion – he pole-vaults over the top and clears it by a country mile. The problem with that approach is eventually you have to hit the ground.

I’d rather have a film with too many ideas than a film with none, and Riley has a lot to say here with enough cleverness that I’m still interested in whatever he’s doing next, even though Sorry to Bother You just doesn’t work. The bravura that Riley brings here does not serve him or the film well, and the best of the ideas – runaway capitalism and the economic inequalities it creates – suffers as a result. If Riley gets an editor, or even a voice over his shoulder encouraging him to pull back on the throttle, his vision could still lead to something brilliant down the road. This just wasn’t it.

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→ January 2, 2019
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Custody.

Custody (Jusqu’à la garde, on amazon and iTunes) is a full-length sequel to the Oscar-nominated short film Just Before Losing Everything, both written and directed by Xavier Legrand and starring the same actors in three of the four main roles. This film, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in 2017 and the Louis Delluc Prize last year, follows the same family from the custody hearing that opens the film through the father’s attempts to control his estranged wife through their twelve-year-old son, building in intensity through its refusal to acquiesce to the commercial impulse toward big, dramatic moments.

The opening scene has Miriam (Léa Drucker) and Antoine (Denis Ménochet), with their lawyers, in a session where each side argues for their desired custody arrangements, which form the only real disagreement between them. Miriam accuses Antoine of abusing her, and has repeatedly changed phone numbers and often hidden her location to protect herself from him. Their daughter, Josephine (Mathilde Auneveux), is about to turn 18, and wants nothing to do with her father. Julien (Thomas Gioria), their son, also wants no contact with his father, but the judge who hears their arguments grants Antoine the visitation rights he wants – apparently dismissing Miriam’s claims of abuse for lack of ‘proof’ – which gives the father the wedge he needs to insinuate himself into Miriam’s life.

The film is spare, just 93 minutes, and even at that length there is little action and a very simple plot, reminiscent in several ways of 2017’s Loveless. Antoine is manipulative and controlling, and his interest in Julien seems limited to using the boy as a way to maintain contact with Miriam and to remain aware of her whereabouts and actions. Gioria is especially strong as a twelve-year-old boy who doesn’t want contact with his father, but also fears him and has the innate respect children have for authority figures, even when (or perhaps especially when) they’re also the victims of those same adults. Some of Custody‘s strongest scenes involve Julien and Antoine doing very little, often barely speaking to each other, or Antoine demanding something only to have Julien try his hardest to avoid answering, and they’re excruciating because Legrand lets these interactions play out in something very close to real time. When Antoine demands that Julien show him their new apartment, Legrand puts us in the car the whole time as Julien tries to direct his father, left, right, straight ahead, for twice as long as you’d expect, giving more time for the anticipation of an eventual explosion to build up.

You don’t need to see the prior film to follow Custody, although it will color your view of the characters in the first few scenes; without that prologue, you can more easily see the judge’s point of view that she must figure out “which of (the parents) is the bigger liar.” It doesn’t take much time to see Antoine’s character come through – first the need to control his wife and children, then his temper and his manipulative nature, and eventually the violence – and at that point anyone watching will realize how badly the judge screwed up, and, in what I assume is Legrand’s point, how poorly the French custody process serves abuse victims if there isn’t an actual crime on record already.

Ménochet also delivers a tremendous performance here even before Antoine’s violent side starts to surface – I’d argue that the performance is better until then, because once it becomes physical, there’s less for the actor to do with the role. Legrand didn’t write this character as a sympathetic one, but also avoided completely dehumanizing the man, so that the scenes with Antoine and Julien can still work as drama – you can understand the son still seeing this man as his father, someone who says he loves him, and an authority figure, rather than just a monster. An adult would see through Antoine, but his own child will always have that inner conflict, and giving the father enough depth gives the audience Julien’s lenses to see him.

Custody has one of the best conclusions of any film I’ve seen from 2018, although it could trigger anyone sensitive to scenes of domestic violence. Given what has come before, it might be the only authentic climax to the story, and then Legrand had his choice of resolutions from that inflection point. By choosing to tell this story slowly, showing detail where most films would speed up to the next moment of action, Legrand has made a film that feels distinctly non-commercial, but that also should evoke more genuine emotions in the audience until that final scene – and by that point, the direction and the acting have earned a big payoff. It’s one of the best films of the year, probably borderline top ten for me right now, and deserves a wider audience here than it’s gotten.

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→ January 1, 2019
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If Beale Street Could Talk.

If Beale Street Could Talk feels like a film that is very of the moment, for its theme and its source material. James Baldwin is himself having a renaissance after the acclaimed documentary I Am Not Your Negro appeared in 2016 and contemporary writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates have explicitly alluded to Baldwin’s works, such as Fire. Even though the novel on which Barry Jenkins, director of the Oscar-winning Moonlight, was written over 40 years ago, it revolves around a very current theme of racial injustice and police misconduct towards African-American men. It succeeds without sermonizing by wrapping those huge themes in a very sweet, straightforward love story between two young black people played by rising stars.

Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt (Stephan James of Homecoming) and Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne, making her film debut) are childhood friends who’ve fallen in love in 1970s New York City, but whose relationship faces many obstacles, including the most obvious one – a society that views them as second-class citizens because they’re black. As the film opens, we learn that Tish, just 19, is pregnant, and that Fonny is behind bars, accused of a rape that he didn’t commit, put there by a vengeful white cop. Jenkins alternates scenes of the present day, where Tish and her family work to try to clear Fonny’s name, with long, languid scenes of their nascent romance, mostly from Tish’s point of view as she also learns more about who Fonny has become as an adult and the challenges a young black man faces, even in a multicultural place like New York.

The story hits a wall when Tish’s mom, played by Regina King, travels to Puerto Rico to try to convince the victim to revoke her identification of Fonnie as the rapist. The scenes that follow are important to the plot, but the lyrical mood Jenkins has set hits an abrupt stop the moment she steps on the island, and it takes the rest of the movie, until the concluding scene, to get that atmosphere back. There’s also an utterly corny scene where Dave Franco, dressed as an observant Jew named Levy, delivers a monologue to Fonnie and Tish to explain why he might be the one landlord in the whole city willing to rent an apartment to a young black couple. The soliloquy is hackneyed, right down to the whole “I don’t care what color you are, black, white, purple” line that could be borrowed from any of a thousand films where a white character tries to explain how he doesn’t see color.

King has been listed as a shoo-in for a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Beale Street, but I don’t think she’s in this film enough to have that sort of impact. She’d slip in under the Judi Dench Exemption, I suppose, but King isn’t the Queen, and her character is actually not that well-developed. There’s nothing missing from King’s performance, but the script just doesn’t demand enough of her. James and Layne are both outstanding, and Bryan Tyree Henry, who is having a year himself, is strong again, this time as a friend of Fonny’s who was just paroled after serving two years for a crime he didn’t commit, but to which he pled guilty rather than face a more serious charge for marijuana possession. (This remains a major reason African-American men are incarcerated today, but first appeared as a weapon of the state, often with the support of leaders of black communities, in the 1960s and 1970s. Locking Up Our Own, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction, documents this trend and its effects on the African-American population.)

Jenkins made several smart decisions that power Beale Street past its flaws and made it one of my top ten movies of 2018, including the choice to retain some of Baldwin’s original prose, often having Tish use it as narration; and the way he maintains much of that glowing atmosphere even into some of the scenes around Fonny’s incarceration and the efforts to clear him. Keeping that mood into early conversations that Tish and Fonny have through glass while he’s in prison makes the scene where he loses control of himself more visceral, and the early scene that you’ve likely seen in the trailer, where the two families come into conflict because Fonny’s mother blames Tish for leading her son into sin, starts out with the same atmosphere only to dissolve as the rancor in the room overtakes it. Between this and Moonlight, Jenkins has made his style very clear – he’s in no rush, often letting scenes breathe longer than any other contemporary director I can name, and when he does take the wheel, such as for close-up shots of specific characters’ faces, you’ll be aware of the transition.

If Beale Street Could Talk seems destined to earn a slew of nominations at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony and lose just about all of them; its best chance, aside from King as Best Supporting Actress, might be in Best Adapted Screenplay, where it will be up against A Star is Born and BlacKkKlansman, although I’d vote for this over both of those. If any film has a chance to upset A Star is Born for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, this would be it. It is a wonderful film, so kind to its two main characters but with a story that will make you seethe by its end, worth seeking out if Annapurna gives it a wider release beyond just the 65 screens it was on this past weekend.

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→ December 31, 2018
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Top ten movies of 2018.

I’ve seen everything I think would likely make this top ten list other than several foreign titles, including Cold War and Capernaum, although I’ll still continue watching 2018 releases for a few more months as they hit theaters or streaming. I’ve seen 40 movies that count as 2018 theatrical releases, not counting the HBO movie The Tale, which would have made my top ten but isn’t eligible for awards because it went straight to television after the network purchased it at Sundance.

With those caveats in place, here’s my top ten as of this morning, and it still could change as I continue to see more 2018 films this winter. Links on the films’ titles go to my reviews.

10. The Endless. A thriller, or perhaps a psychological horror movie, that garnered positive reviews with a modest release, The Endless follows two brothers who, having escaped a cult where they grew up, revisit the compound to try to find some closure, only to discover that a mysterious presence has kept their old cultmates from aging and seems to prevent anyone from leaving.

9. First Man. Considered something of a box-office flop, Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to La La Land goes in a completely different direction, telling the quiet, almost painfully restrained story of Neil Armstrong, from the death of his young daughter to cancer to his landing on the moon. Ryan Gosling and Clare Foy are excellent as the two leads, although the emphasis on accuracy in depicting space flight made some scenes very hard for me to watch.

8. Isle of Dogs. This should win the Best Animated Feature Oscar, although I fear the silly Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse will win (I admit Spider-ham is pretty funny, though) instead. Wes Anderson’s second animated film, his first from an original story, is brilliant, emotional in the right ways, often funny, and extremely well-voiced by a cast of Wes usuals along with the welcome addition of Bryan Cranston.

7. The Favourite. Yorgis Lanthimos’ follow-up to the The Lobster is a bawdy, lowbrow comedy in nice clothes, and it’s hilarious, thanks to the combined efforts of Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz, all three of whom deserve awards consideration. The story itself isn’t new – it’s a power struggle combined with a bizarre love triangle – but the dialogue sparkles and the three stars, aided by a strong supporting turn from Nicholas Hoult, all slay in their respective roles.

6. If Beale Street Could Talk. A lovely, languid adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, Beale Street stars Stephan James (of Homecoming) and Kiki Layne as young lovers who find they’re expecting just as he’s headed to jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

5. You Were Never Really Here. A taut modern noir thriller, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a damaged private eye who rescues kidnapped girls and ends up caught in a case that threatens his safety and his sanity. Lynne Ramsay’s latest film, her first feature since 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, clocks in at a spare 90 minutes, leaving no slack in the tension.

4. Beast. Driven by a star turn by relative newcomer Jessie Buckley, Beast follows a young woman in her late 20s who falls for the local outcast, who is himself a potential suspect in the murders of three other teenaged girls in their small town. The contrast between the idyllic setting and the darkness throughout the plot further drives the viewer’s sense of unease at every turn.

3. Shoplifters. My top three films are all foreign films, which is purely coincidental, and all made the Academy Award’s shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2019 Oscars. Japan’s entry is a simple, intimate portrait of a makeshift family of grifters who take in a neglected four-year-old girl they find playing outside in the cold in their tenement. Director/writer Hirokazu Kore-eda took hold the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this film, which has a huge heart and explores the essentially human need for the connections and security of family through a group of well-rounded characters.

2. Roma. Alfonso Cuarón’s passion project for Netflix lived up to the lofty expectations set for it. Based on his own childhood in Mexico City, including the life of his nanny/housekeeper Cleo, Roma is told from her perspective, as she gets pregnant by a man who abandons her and sees the marriage of her employers crumble, all amidst the tumult of protest-torn Mexico in the early 1970s. The story can be a shade slow, and Cleo is the only real character of depth, but the cinematography is the best of the year – maybe in several years – and the film seems set to win awards for its sound as well.

1. Burning. Adapted from a scant Haruki Murakami story called “Barn Burning,” this Korean-language film creates an air of uncertainty from the start, and its three main characters remain unknowable to the dramatic conclusion. Lee Jong-su meets a girl, Shin Hae-mi, who says she knew him in grade school, and after a few days he’s clearly in love with her, only to have her go to Africa on a trip and ask him to watch her cat for her. When she comes back, she’s with a suave, wealthy guy, Ben, who might be her new boyfriend, and Jong-su can’t figure out what to do – or what exactly Ben does for his strange hobby. It’s a hypnotic slow burner anchored by one of the year’s best performances from Steven Yeun as Ben.

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→ December 30, 2018
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Minding the Gap.

As much as the awards-season conversation has been dominated by Netflix (for Roma) and amazon (for several TV series, including the very good Homecoming), Hulu has quietly had a banner year as well by moving into documentaries, with two of its properties making the shortlist for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. One of them, Minding the Gap, seems like a lock for a nomination given its universal acclaim and the timeliness of its subject, exploring the lives of three young men in Rockford, Illinois, all skateboarders and all products of traumatic childhoods.

Bing Liu is the filmmaker and one of the three subjects, having begun filming his friends as they skateboarded around Rockford as preteens and continued it in his early 20s (Liu is 24 now) with both interview footage and scenes from their daily lives. The two other main subjects are Zack Milligan, a handsome, volatile kid of 21 or 22 who now has a son with his 18-year-old girlfriend Nina (also a product of a violent home); and Keire Johnson, an African-American kid who can pile systemic and tacit racism on top of the challenges he already faced from a traumatic upbringing. The three men all respond to the challenges of their lives in different ways, notably Zack, who has become a physically and emotionally abusive partner to Nina and even tries to manipulate their depictions on camera by playing an audio recording of Nina screaming at him without explaining that it was preceded by him physically assaulting her.

As the story progresses, the details of the family lives of all four of these young adults become clear – three grew up in physically abusive environments; Keire lost his father at a young age, while Bing only saw his father three times since age 5. Zack’s childhood is the most opaque, even though he really never shuts up while he’s on camera, and is blessed or cursed with good looks (he reminds me of the ’90s actor Jeremy London) and a self-confidence that convinces him he’s smarter than he really is, which becomes very apparent in a soliloquy later in the film where he justifies his own bad choices by calling people who choose a predictable family life as ‘weak.’ He’s damaged, as all four of the principals (including Nina) are, but he’s also doing the least to cope with it, self-medicating, lashing out physically and emotionally, and stringing Nina along until she finally takes him to court for child support.

The appeal of Minding the Gap is how raw it is, including the footage Liu shot ten years earlier, as well his decision to insert his own story into a narrative that also includes other people. Documentaries seem to follow the either/or path: it’s about your own story (Strong Island) or it’s about someone else’s, but not both. Liu’s history of abuse comes out later in the film, but the arc of his life, including his use of skateboarding as an escape from a bad home situation, dovetails perfectly with those of his friends. And while Liu is occasionally heard interviewing subjects, he’s as unobtrusive in that role as he could be.

Where the film falters is around the three men themselves. Keire and Bing are compelling and sympathetic, but also both reserved by nature, and there’s often a feeling that they’re not revealing as much to the camera as the audience might need to hear from them – especially Keire, who has a mischievous smile he puts on every time he’s lost in thought, even if the thought is unpleasant. Zack, meanwhile, comes off as a real asshole – granted, one with trauma in his own past, someone who probably needs real treatment for PTSD and other mental health issues, but his treatment of Nina and general disregard for others around him is hard to accept even with Bing essentially vouching for his buddy by including his story. He also seems to have a knack for finding women he can manipulate, which comes off particularly poorly as Bing gets Nina’s back story of a horrendous childhood and lack of any kind of family structure until her aunt and uncle take her into their house when she’s 21 and has a 3-year-old in tow.

I personally found the domestic scenes between Zack and Nina excruciating to watch because he is just awful – awful to her, and awful in the way a child trying to act like an adult can be awful. There’s a sense here that Liu is still finding his voice as a documentarian, that he had great material and stumbled on a tremendous subject, but has to learn more about assembling what he collects into a coherent narrative or series of them. Minding the Gap has garnered incredible acclaim to date, with 62 positive reviews for a 100% rating on RottenTomatoes, and the Best Documentary Feature award may come down to this versus Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but I didn’t see it in quite that light. It’s a strong debut that might be the harbinger of a great career for Liu, but it’s also flawed and didn’t do enough to grab and hold my attention throughout its tapestry of three stories.

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→ December 27, 2018
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Zama.

Zama, available on amazon Prime, is the weirdest movie I’ve seen this year. Originally released in Argentina in 2017 and submitted by that country for this past year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it’s based on a 1956 novel and plays out like a Kafkaesque fever dream in colonial South America, where lives are cheap and promises worthless. It’s violent and full of confusion, to the point that it’s unclear whether any of what we’re seeing is real, or whether the main character himself is losing his mind. I haven’t read the novel, which wasn’t translated into English until 2016, but any sort of guidebook would have helped me navigate this weirdness, which had me befuddled from the opening scene and never did much to set me on track.

Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a local functionary in Spanish South America, in the town that is now Ascúncion, Paraguay, who has been waiting some time for a transfer order to reunite him with his wife and child. His title, corregidor, was unique to the Spanish colonial system and referred to the top official in a subdivision of the country’s massive holdings in the Americas, dating back to Castile in the Middle Ages, and they were typically quite powerful because they worked at such great distances from their superiors. Zama, however, always answers to a governor in this film, first one and then his replacement, and the transfer is forever delayed or even forgotten by the men with the power to put them into action. He continues to rule over petty matters of the locals but becomes increasingly erratic, at one point promising two Spanish landowners thirty Native Americans as slaves, and eventually gives up hope of a transfer and joins a vigilante party searching for the bandit Vicuña Porto, who was supposedly killed (twice, I think) earlier in the film but remains a threat to trade and travel between cities.

Zama starts the film as a sort of would-be lothario, obsessed with the lady Luciana (Lola Dueñas, who is made up and dressed to look utterly ridiculous), and acting as the protector of some young women in his household of unknown purpose. He becomes more disheveled as the film progresses, and the dialogue starts to break down and become increasingly disjointed, to the point where I wasn’t sure if I had missed bits of it or if the characters were simply speaking past each other. Zama brings up the letter multiple times in conversation at one point, only to have the governor seem to completely forget what he was talking about. There’s also a llama in the governor’s office at one point, never explained and never remarked upon by any characters, who seem to regard it as just another llama in the office (reminiscent of Elizabeth Moss’ roommate in The Square). I assume it was partly a play on Vicuña Porto’s name – a vicuña is a South American camel related to llamas – and thus an acknowledgement that he always exists under their noses and they’re unable or unwilling to defeat him.

Zama felt like an experimental novel brought to the screen but losing too much in translation. The gruesome finale feels absurd and metaphorical, but a scene like that requires a greater foundation to provide it with sufficient impact beyond mere revulsion. The extra descriptive text in that sort of book can make it comprehensible, but here I couldn’t get much further than understanding that Diego de Zama was a man trapped in a remote place in circumstances he couldn’t control, to the point that it may have caused him to lose his sanity. And that is a story I’ve seen before.

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→ December 26, 2018
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Blindspotting.

Blindspotting (amazon • iTunes) marks the writing debut for its co-stars, Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton) and Rafael Casal, who play the two lead characters, best friends in Oakland who end up confronting explicit and implicit racial bias over the course of three days in the city. It is spotty – no pun intended – okay, maybe a little bit intended – but also contains many strong scenes that point to the tremendous vision of the two writers that might just need a little more development time.

Diggs plays Collin, who has three days left on his yearlong probation for an assault that occurred while he was working as a bouncer at an area bar, and Casal plays his best friend Miles. Collin is black, Miles is white, and the two have been best friends since grade school. Miles ‘acts’ black, to the point where Collin refers to him with some affection by the n-word, but their relationship doesn’t reflect how the world as a whole views the two of them. Meanwhile, Collin is driving home from one of their jobs for a moving company one night when he sees a white police officer kill an unarmed black man who is fleeing and has his back turned when he’s shot. Because of the circumstances of his probation, he chooses not to come forward as a witness, which haunts him over the remainder of the film.

Blindspotting is about everyday racism, which means we get a greatest hits sort of look at the subject. Police brutality and BLM come up multiple times, in humorous and serious contexts. Guns and how people, including the police, view a white man with a gun and a black man with a gun differently also figure in the plot. The gentrification of Oakland, which has been becoming less black, is a regular topic within the dialogue, and drives a scene where Collin and Miles go to a party held by a white hipster tech executive that ends poorly when Miles loses his temper, as he’s wont to do.

There are plenty of well-drawn side characters here, including Collin’s ex-girlfriend Val (Janina Gavankar), whose ethnicity is left unstated in a film where racial identity is paramount; and Miles’ African-American wife Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones, also of Hamilton), but the two men are the heart of the film. Both are complex, but Collin is better developed, and the script maintains the audience’s connection to him by gradually revealing the depth of the character over the course of the film, reserving the story of why he went to jail until somewhere around the midpoint, a flashback that really changes the perception of his character.

The climactic scene in Blindspotting is both absurd and its best, tightest sequence, requiring a fair-sized coincidence and a touch of reality suspension … but this is Diggs’ screaming guitar solo here, and he absolutely nails it. Although this is fiction, it reminded me of the monologue Hannah Gadsby delivers at the end of her comedy special Nanette, where she has lulled the audience into acquiescence with some blisteringly funny jokes, only to turn very serious on her captive audience and give a speech on equality and identity that could crumble mountains. Diggs’ performance in this last scene enters that same zone of unreality – we were here, now you’ve just moved us somewhere else, but we were already in the moment enough that we’ll just come along for the ride. There’s a level of trust required to pull off that kind of trick. Gadsby completely earns that trust. Diggs gets most of the way there, and has to resort to a gimmick to keep viewers in that moment long enough to complete the scene.

Blindspotting‘s humor isn’t as consistent as it tries to be – the best gag in the film is a sight gag around Collin’s hair – with a lot of cringeworthy jokes that don’t land and feel out of place in a film that’s trying to deal with some huge subjects. Miles handles the bulk of the successful comic relief, and Casal’s fast-talking act is riveting to watch. His negotiations with a potential buyer over a sailboat are Marx Brothers-level comedy and among the funniest moments in the film. That lightens the mood for a while, but the humor eventually fades out or just stops working (the scenes at the hipster party, with the utterly clueless white host, are really painful) while the serious nature of the film takes precedence. It’s not a top ten film of the year for me, but it’s a very good one, and I think a very promising writing debut for Diggs and Casal.

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→ December 24, 2018
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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is technically a movie – it was released to theaters, and is also on Netflix as a single, 135-minute … well, movie. But it’s also kind of not a movie: it’s an anthology of six stories that have nothing in common beyond their settings, the American West of the frontier period, and the fact that Joel and Ethan Coen wrote and directed all of them. As you might find with any short story anthology, this sextet has highs and lows; the longest story here is the least interesting and perhaps worst acted, while there are also some truly brilliant moments comparable to the best work the Coens have done.

The first story bears the title of the whole film, and it’s short, silly, and establishes the theme that runs throughout the entire anthology – fate does not care for your narratives. You may take this as meaning the universe is random, or simply that man proposes, God disposes, but regardless, the Coens revel here in setting up one story only to take a right turn at the conclusion. Buster Scruggs is a sharp-shooting, fast-talking outlaw, prone to hifalutin vocabulary and expressing himself through song, a bad guy who enjoys killing worse guys and then singing over their corpses. He’s utterly ridiculous except that he’s good enough to shoot off a man’s trigger finger at a significant distance, until, of course, he meets someone a bit quicker.

The six films are all pretty dark, even when they’re very funny, and only one has anything you might consider a ‘happy’ ending. Tom Waits appears in the fourth story as a lonely goldpanner who spends days digging in a bucolic riverside spot to find the vein he believes is there, only to learn he’s been followed by a jumper with a pistol. What follows turns the narrative on its head and then flips it back again, although all of the story takes a back seat to the gorgeous scenery, which reminded me of the incredible landscape shots from the Coens’ remake of True Grit.

The worst of the six, by far, is set on the Oregon Trail, where Zoe Kazan plays a young woman traveling with her mansplaining brother to Oregon, where he’ll start a business and she’s due to be married to his business partner. He dies rather early in the trip, which is no great loss to the viewer, leaving the story to focus on the travails of a young woman left on her own on the caravan with no one to help her but a hired boy she may not be able to pay. The plot itself fits the broader themes of the anthology, but Kazan looks and especially sounds completely out of place here. I thought she was the weak link in The Big Sick, and I think she’s even more of a problem here, only adding value because she’s little and that helps emphasize the helpless nature of her character.

That leads into the concluding story, a gothic horror story set on a stagecoach at night, the one part of the film that feels like a play and by far the portion of this anthology that boasts the best cast, including Tyne Daly and Brendan Gleeson as two of five travelers on the coach. As they talk and argue, telling bits of their life stories, it becomes less clear that the passengers understand where they are going – and, to the Coens’ great credit, it isn’t clear at the end of the story, either.

Aside from the uneven nature of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which is inevitable for any set of six mini-films, the anthology suffers from how few real female characters it has in the film. Four of the stories have none; the last two have one each, Kazan’s and Daly’s, and the latter, while probably my favorite performance in the entire movie, shares screen time with four other actors all kind of having the times of their lives. (There’s a little surprise for Major League fans in this segment, but I won’t ruin it.) I could understand an argument that a movie set in the Old West would likely have few women in an authentic plot, but six different stories, only one revolves around a woman, and she’s not very strong at all. In a year where most of the best films had women at or near the hearts of their plots, the lack thereof in this film stands out as a real weakness.

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→ December 18, 2018
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Shoplifters.

Shoplifters, Japan’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a nominee for the same award at the Golden Globes, is a little film with an enormous heart that spends almost all of its two hours on the verge of shattering, asking huge questions about the meaning of family without providing any easy answers. It won the top prize at Cannes, the Palme d’Or, this past May, and is out in U.S. art theaters now.

The family at the heart of the film includes Osamu Shibata and young Shota Shibata, who work as a team of shoplifters to cope with their poverty, as Osamu says that items in a store belong to nobody until someone purchases them. Coming home from one such escapade, they spot a very young girl, four or five, named Yuri, playing outside in the cold, alone, with scars on her arms that point to child abuse. They take her in, and her arrival in the household – which includes Osamu’s wife, Nobuyo; her young sister, Aki; and Hatsue*, whom they all call “Grandma” – changes the dynamic within their tiny apartment, at first causing strife (such as Shota’s jealousy) but eventually bringing some of them closer to each other and causing them to act much more like a family, culminating in a big day out to the beach for Yuri’s first time seeing the ocean. Over the course of the film, director/writer Kore-eda Hirokazu gradually reveals the actual relationships among these different characters, who form a family by choice rather than by blood, opening up questions of what it means to be a family and how much we need those relationships to thrive. Of course, this situation can’t last, and when a shoplifting trip goes off the rails, the family is caught, and no one escapes unscathed from the aftermath.

* The actress who played Grandma, Kiki Kirin, passed away in September at the age of 75, after the film’s release in Japan.

Although Shoplifters never stops moving – there’s barely any silence in the film, as the characters are always talking, even if it’s about the most mundane matters – almost everything that happens in the script is there to highlight some facet of the family’s dynamic, and how these people, all misfits of some sort, have come together to fill in the voids in their lives left by the absence of a proper family. Nobuyo and Hatsue have a running conversation throughout the film about whether family is better when you choose it, rather than when it’s chosen for you; Nobuyo thinks the bond is stronger when it’s one you chose. Even though Shota, who, as you might have guessed, isn’t actually Osamu and Nobuyo’s son, and Yuri were kidnapped, they were also both taken from situations where their families neglected or abused them, and taken into a household where they were provided with love and affection – which doesn’t excuse the kidnapping, certainly not in the eyes of the authorities, but again raises the question of what happens to us when our biological families don’t give us what we need.

None of the adult characters has clean hands in this story, and Kore-eda takes pains to avoid lionizing them for their poverty or absolving them of their sins for their kindness towards Shota and Yuri. Aki’s parents think she’s studying abroad (maybe), but she’s actually working in a peep show parlor, where she may be falling in love with a customer. Grandma milks her late husband’s family for regular gifts, but complains about their parsimony. Nobuyo and Osamu have a bigger secret that isn’t revealed till the tail end of the film, as well as the true story of how and where they found Shota. Kore-eda has given his characters good intentions, but each shows an entirely human failure of execution, while the various authorities, from a shady landlord to the investigators who eventually find the family, all seem able to execute while suffering from an absence of heart.

You’ll want a happy ending for these characters by the end of Shoplifters, especially for the two kids, but it just wouldn’t be realistic, and doing so would undermine the points Kore-eda is trying to make with his melancholy story. Characters who don’t fit in anywhere, who live on the margins of society and take the family they can build because the world hasn’t given them another one, aren’t going to get that kind of resolution.

Sakura Ando is especially affecting as Nobuyo, whose history we see in glimpses that hint at past tragedies, and who ultimately sacrifices more than anyone else to try to make things right for Shota. Both kids are played by first-time actors – Kairi J? (Jo), who plays Shota, looks like he’s going to lead a J-pop boy band at some point, while tiny Miyu Sasaki, playing Yuri, has a knack for heart-melting facial expressions, especially amazing for someone who was just five or six when this was filmed.

Embed from Getty Images

J?, Sasaki, and Mayu Matsuoka (Aki)

Shoplifters even beat out Burning at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards for best film, and both should be nominated for Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category, although that one seems like it’s Roma‘s to lose. It’s such a lovely, heartbreaking film, with such universal themes, that it’s worth seeking out near you while it’s still playing in independent theaters.

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→ December 17, 2018
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Roma.

Alfonso Cuarón’s passion project Roma, his first film as director in five years and just his eighth feature film since his debut in 1991, has already become the most-lauded movie of 2018, and it’s easily one of the best I’ve seen this year. It looks different from anything else I’ve watched, it sounds incredible, and the script finds a seemingly impossible equilibrium between the tension of its story and the lyrical quality of both the setting and the way Cuarón layers the scenes with moving cameras.

Based on Cuarón’s childhood, growing up in the Colonia Roma neighborhood in Mexico City, Roma shows us this story through the eyes of the family’s maid, Cleo, played by first-time actress and preschool teacher Yalitza Aparicio. Cleo, a woman of Mixteco ancestry who speaks that language to other servants but Spanish to the family, and another servant Adela seem to handle everything for the family, as the father is emotionally absent when there and then physically leaves the film not that long after it begins, while the mother seems incapable of handling even basic domestic chores – or just unwilling to do so. Cleo cooks, cleans, puts the kids to bed, wakes them up, dresses them for school, takes them there, picks them up, and more, while the mother, Sofia, watches and occasionally criticizes, when she’s not dealing with an obviously breaking marriage to Antonio.

Cleo’s story eventually takes center stage when she becomes pregnant by Fermin, a young, feckless man, obsessed with martial arts, who naturally leaves her the moment he finds out she’s expecting. Along the way, we see the resolution of the issue with Sofia and Antonio’s marriage, the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre of antigovernment protesters by a PRI-backed paramilitary group, the tensions between landowners and tenants outside of Mexico City, and the divides of race and class that separate Cleo and Adela from the children they care for every day. Almost everything that happens in the movie is serious, even heavy, from a marriage imploding to an unplanned pregnancy to political unrest to, eventually, a threat to some of the main characters, yet the film is often silly or sweetly funny, especially when it comes to Sofia’s attempts to drive the family’s oversized car or Fermin’s naked display of toxic masculinity.

If Roma had been a major American studio release with a big budget and dialogue in English, the posters could easily have used the tagline “Cancel All Men.” Every male character in this film is some sort of terrible, with Antonio and Fermin competing for the title of worst. Cleo is the heart of the movie and the only character to get full development; the kids are more like props, and Sofia is often shown in shadow because we see her through Cleo’s eyes. The necessity for Sofia, Cleo, and Sofia’s mother to carry on in Antonio’s absence in a culture that clearly doesn’t respect women the way it respects men is never made explicit but is a clear undercurrent throughout the story. Cuarón populates the film with lesser male characters as well – the chauvinist doctor who doesn’t think Sofia’s (female) obstetrician is up to the task, the random creep who decides Sofia needs ‘cheering up,’ even the comic Professor Zovek (played by the Mexican wrestler known as Latin Lover), whose outfit should have left more to the imagination.

As compelling as the plot can be at times – the protests, the delivery, the beach scene near the conclusion – Roma is an even better technical achievement. Shot in black and white, filmed by Cuarón himself after his regular cinematographer couldn’t commit to the full three and a half months for the project, Roma plays out like a fugue for the eyes, with cameras often moving laterally at a different pace from the characters they’re following, with characters in the backdrop moving at yet another pace. (If I see this again, I’d like to just try to watch what’s happening in the background, as there was never enough time to focus on that and the main characters, but I always knew there was more to see if I shifted my gaze.) The quality and pervasive sense given by the sound is just as remarkable; even watching at home, without any high-end equipment, I felt immersed by the sound of the waves in that beach scene, so much so that I was mildly relieved I hadn’t seen it in the theater because it might have been overwhelming. Cuarón seems to have made this film to put viewers into a specific atmosphere of time and place, using these visual and auditory techniques to do so, and it works, well enough to make up for the lack of strong characters beyond Cleo or the non-traditional nature of the plot, which has several smaller, interlocking arcs rather than a single narrative that takes us from start to finish.

Roma has already won top honors from film critics’ groups in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York (three different such bodies), San Francisco, Toronto, and Washington, although it was ineligible for the Golden Globe category for Best Motion Picture – Drama. (The Golden Globes can be a fun telecast, but their movie awards and nominees the last two years have been awful.) It seems like Roma is a dead lock in two categories at the Oscars, for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography, and should earn nominations in Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound Editing at the very least. I’d love to see Aparicio get a Best Actress nomination, but that seems like an unrealistic hope given her much more famous competition; I’d certainly give her the nod over Glenn Close (The Wife) or Melissa McCarthy (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), both of whom are currently in the top five on GoldDerby.com’s Oscar odds. I still have a few contenders left to see, but this and Burning are the two best films I’ve seen so far in 2018.

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