Film Intuition: Review Database

Movie Review: Sundown (2021)

2022-01-18T17:07:00.005-07:00

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In writer-director Michael Franco's "Sundown," Tim Roth plays a man named Neil who, in the sundown of his life, wants to bask in the warmth of that sun for as long as he can before it goes down for good. Knowing that with this comfort comes great risk, regardless of how bright the rays get, for most of the film's running time, Neil remains just as frustratingly resigned as he is fascinatingly opaque.

An existential cross between Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Updike's “Rabbit, Run,” and Camus' “The Stranger,” yet missing what makes all three great by foolishly giving us a justification for our main character's behavior, in “Sundown,” Neil abandons his family on a Mexican vacation and never returns.

Having traveled to the sandy beaches of Acapulco from London along with three loved ones (brought to life by Charlotte Gainsbourg, Albertine Kotting McMillan, and Samuel Bottomley), when Gainsbourg receives word that a family member back home has died, Roth goes through the supportive motions of packing everyone up and heading to the airport.

Once there, he tells them he's left his passport behind and as soon as he finds it, he'll be on the very next flight. So convinced of his love and caught up in her own grief that she misses the hollowness of his words and the way that it sounds like a very different kind of farewell, Gainsbourg departs and takes the two teens with her. Venturing back to the hotel, not to look for the passport but head for the beach instead, Neil blows off all follow-up calls with false promises for as long as he can while he parks himself on the nearest lawn chair.

Seeing it all unfold, between Roth's standoffishness, as well as the film's long takes, and frames that only go in for close-ups when it counts, Franco toys with questions of accountability and voyeurism. With no one to follow but the aloof, largely nonvocal Neil throughout “Sundown,” we begin to feel not only unnervingly complicit but perhaps, far more invested in the aftermath of Neil's actions than he is.

Finding a girlfriend almost immediately to share in the fun of Acapulco sex and sun, Neil's ability to let everything roll off of his back – including gunfire and death – makes us immediately reject the idea that all he's having is a late midlife crisis. Wading into territory far beyond the lyrics of “Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack. I went out for a ride and I never went back. Like a river that don't know where it's flowing, I took a wrong turn and I just kept going,” which Bruce Springsteen sang in “Hungry Heart,” “Sundown” gives us a man whom we feel is "losing" more than he is "lost."

So when a second, shocking death occurs that, although not directly Neil's fault, is nonetheless the direct result of his having decided to stay in Mexico, we begin to wonder what "Sundown" is telling us about karma, fate, free will, or predestination after all. Is Neil simply a man who like Bartleby has had enough of the rat race or “would prefer not to?" Or is he doing what he's doing to try – as in either a mid-twentieth-century French existential novel or a '90s Michael Haneke movie – to feel something, even if it's cruel? And though honestly, I wish we didn't know the answer, nor had "Sundown" even begin to flirt with the idea that there is one overall, unfortunately, Michel Franco decides to give us a reason for Neil's raison d'être that's as prosaic as it is clumsily handled.

Vague by necessity, regrettably, that's about as much as I can tell you about the film without going even deeper into spoiler territory. Proof that the best part of any movie is the conversation you have about it afterward, although, for at least half of its 83-minute length, I was completely caught up in Roth's performance as well as its boldly inscrutable spell, my biggest takeaway from “Sundown” is how close it came to greatness before it all fell apart. (And perhaps it isn't a spoiler to say that the film continued on for one twist more than it needed.)

Handled better, of course, it's perfectly fine to give viewers clues as to why a complex character behaves the way that they do. In another sun-drenched tale of bad behavior on holiday in the form of writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal's remarkable 2021 Netflix release “The Lost Daughter," this approach of psychologically character-driven storytelling strengthened her narrative overall. Yet what's missing from Franco's “Sundown,” is the intimacy that we experienced in "The Lost Daughter," based upon the novel by Elena Ferrante. Whereas Gyllenhaal's film felt more like reading someone's diary aloud to them as they watched, "Sundown" feels in contrast to sitting and waiting for a Polaroid picture to start to develop and being a bit dismayed by the result.

Not wanting to spend any real time on Neil's interior life, Franco's “Sundown” keeps us at an arm's length for most of the film, just preferring to let things happen naturally, as observed on Roth's pensive poker or Buster Keaton-like stone face to the point that even a random spray of gunfire on a crowded beach fails to rouse him from his stasis. Yet as unflappable as Neil appears to be in front of the camera, behind it, in contrast, Franco eventually gives in to the pressures of storytelling convention. And though he hopes to be somewhat subtle, this too-late attempt to let us behind Neil's curtain comes off as manipulative, unearned, and disingenuous. Needing either more complexity or more opacity to make us feel like we're staring at the sun alongside our maddening lead, when Franco finally gives us sunglasses to sharpen our view, the film goes from blue sky success to chaotic storm.

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A Year in Review: Jen's Favorite Films of 2021

2022-01-06T15:16:00.023-07:00

A Year in Review:

Jen's Favorite Films of 2021

by Jen Johans

An Introduction:

For me, it really starts in November. That's when I begin to draft my first tentative, incomplete list of the best films I've seen all year and it's also when more screeners land in my inbox and door. No longer covering festivals and instead, spending most of my year revisiting older titles to prepare for my podcast Watch With Jen, November is also when I survey my friends and colleagues to figure out which films I should prioritize, and how much I still need to watch to not only vote in three different critics organizations but create this list overall.

Boring bookkeeping aside, however, it's also when I do what I most love as a film buff, which is to go beyond frequently listed favorites to search for buried treasure to share with others. Every year, it seems there are films that a majority of critics loved that, for whatever reason, just don't register with me nearly as much as others I feel a personal connection to that are either overlooked or under-praised by the traditional press. Of course, in this pursuit, I'm also limited by which films were available to be safely screened for me by my deadline. (For example, you won't read about “West Side Story” or “Parallel Mothers” in this article because I haven't seen them yet.)

Still, featuring everything from big studio franchise fare to the smallest indies, docs, or foreign titles, this compilation of 2021 favorites is much more diverse than the list I created a year ago. Another difference I've noticed is the sheer number of recurring themes that seem to exist within these films, regardless of who made them, where, and how.

From “American Graffiti” to “Three Colors: Red,” fittingly for the movies, which is a medium that Roger Ebert famously described as “a machine that generates empathy,” one of my main screen obsessions has always been tales of unexpected human connection or stories where characters you would never expect to cross paths and connect suddenly do. Whether it's in “Drive My Car” or “Language Lessons,” such films show up multiple times in this list and doubtlessly, have taken on more poignancy during the global pandemic, as did my interest in films and characters who are all grappling with the past.

From unearthed footage captured in the tumultuous 1960s that's been edited together in music documentaries like “The Beatles: Get Back” to tales of flawed individuals utterly haunted by their pasts, as we move forward yet stand still in life in the time of Covid, we increasingly find ourselves needing to look back.

Rather than rank my favorites in arbitrary numerical order, I thought that it would make much more sense to write about them naturally by theme and focus on the ways that (for me, at least) so many of these films relate to and/or interact with one another. More than just rattling off these titles as options for a quick watch, while I know you probably won't love them all, I hope you'll find some new favorites from among this list to eagerly look back on as a snapshot of how art tried to make sense of life in 2021.

The films you'll read about here (in order of how they're dissected) include: “The Power of the Dog,” “Old Henry,” “The Harder They Fall,” “The Dry,” “Wrath of Man,” “The Many Saints of Newark,” “No Time To Die,” “The Lost Daughter,” “Mass,” “Test Pattern,” “Flee,” “The Velvet Underground,” “The Beatles: Get Back,” “Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” “Drive My Car,” “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” “The Worst Person in the World,” “Licorice Pizza,” “Cyrano,” “Language Lessons,” “Luca,” and “The Mitchells vs. the Machines.”

Compiling this list, I found myself haunted by Paul Thomas Anderson's ambitiously sprawling 1999 Altmanesque masterwork “Magnolia." While undoubtedly on my mind because his latest film “Licorice Pizza” appears in this year in review (and is also, fittingly, set in the past), the questions raised in “Magnolia” about trauma, forgiveness, revenge, history, justice, and how these things can fester and get passed down from father to son or mother to daughter were everywhere in the films of 2021. As Philip Baker Hall's character Jimmy Gator tells us in Anderson's film, "the book says, we may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us.”

But more than that oft-cited proclamation that evokes the bible's Book of Exodus in the same way that the title of "The Power of the Dog" does the Book of Psalms, it was this “Magnolia” monologue, spoken by John C. Reilly's character late in the film that I found impossible to forget when I started thinking about a majority of these movies as a whole:

“A lot of people think this is just a job that you go to... take a lunch hour, the job's over, something like that. But it's a twenty-four-hour deal... no two ways about it... and what most people don't see is just how hard it is to do the right thing. People think if I make a judgment call that it's a judgment on them. But that's not what I do, and that's not what should be done. I have to take everything and play it as it lays. Sometimes people need a little help. Sometimes people need to be forgiven. And sometimes they need to go to jail. And that's a very tricky thing on my part... making that call. The law is the law, and heck if I'm gonna break it. But if you can forgive someone... well, that's the tough part. What can we forgive? Tough part of the job. Tough part of walking down the street.”

While in Reilly's case, the job is law enforcement, he might just as well be talking about the job of life or of walking down the street in the middle of a pandemic amid so much uncertainty and chaos. It's a “job” we're constantly needing to redefine and that's precisely what happens in the year's films.

In the opening voice-over of my favorite movie of 2021 – Jane Campion's “The Power of the Dog” – a young man (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee) explains that following his father's death, he's done everything in his power that he could to make his mother happy. Going further, he asks what kind of man he would be if he did not rescue or save her. Although it flies right by the first time you watch Campion's spare western masterpiece, on a second viewing as my dear friend Walter Chaw pointed out on my pod, it's impossible to miss the way that everything that follows in “Dog” harks back to those opening words and in its questions of what kind of man one should become.

It's a query that Benedict Cumberbatch's character is also consumed by as a man still worshipful of an old male mentor in his past, and one whose discomfort with his own sexuality and skin is something he takes out on everyone else, from his brother (Jesse Plemmons) he ridicules to his new sister-in-law (Kristen Dunst) he torments, as well as her son (Smit-McPhee). Whether he's swaggering into the frame or subtly dominating it with merely the sound of his voice or the strum of his banjo, we're conditioned by the western genre to react to the show of raw alpha masculine power exhibited by Cumberbatch in his career-best performance. Crucially however, yet so, so subtly you might miss it in the first go-round (even if you are familiar with Campion's previous studies of sex and gender), it's still quite the surprise that it's the effeminate, bookish, paper flower maker played by Smit-McPhee who rises to take Cumberbatch's swinging dick on.

A film where its quiet power comes through more in your recollection or memory of it after you watch as "Dog" consumes your thoughts almost as much as Cumberbatch's screen mentor Bronco Henry does him, part of the brilliance of “The Power of the Dog” is in the way that it haunts. Making you reconsider just what is strength and what is weakness against the backdrop of an oversized western environment where – despite its wide-open spaces – absolutely none of its characters seem to fit, while it's Campion's first traditional western, it feels like a natural progression to films like not only “The Piano,” but especially, her underrated “Holy Smoke” and “In the Cut.”

However, she was far from alone in picking up these reins. More than any other genre (except for, perhaps, musicals), 2021 was the year of the western. A popular genre that seems to come back whenever we're faced with great uncertainty like the end of a war – and one where its fundamental building blocks of cops and robbers or heroes/antiheroes and villains evolved into what we know as the crime movie – this year was full of westerns, whether its characters wore Stetsons and shit-kickers or not. And in addition to “The Power of the Dog,” two more traditional westerns rounded out my best list.

A genre veteran who recently learned a plethora of quick-draw gun tricks while making the Coen Brothers western “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” “Old Henry” stars character actor Tim Blake Nelson as a rancher with a past that he realizes he must fall back on when he crosses paths with a mysterious man beaten and left for dead, armed with a gun and a satchel of cash. Knowing he can't just leave him in a field, Nelson brings him back to nurse his wounds, warning his son not to get too close, but even though they try to keep their distance, close closes in on them. Soon, the law (or something like it) comes calling in the form of others looking for the man, which puts both Nelson and his son at risk.

A finely crafted indie that sneaks up on you and culminates in a crowd-pleasing, applause-worthy twist, writer-director Potsy Ponciroli's “Old Henry” feels like a long lost B-western made in John Ford's darker era of the late '50s or early '60s, only one deemed too gritty for release that's been instead left dusty, dingy, ready, and waiting in an old film canister on a studio shelf.

But while the crackerjack “Old Henry” adheres to the traditional staples of the genre, the excitingly revisionist Black western “The Harder They Fall,” from director Jeymes Samuel (which Samuel co-wrote with Boaz Yakin) tries, at least initially, to reinvent the wheel. For a little while leaving me in the dust by focusing more on style than substance, it takes a good ten or fifteen minutes or so to move past an early scene that felt like it had come right out of the tired era of Tarantino dialogue retreads of the 1990s. But just when I was ready to write “Harder” off, the film found its footing, introduced Regina King, and took us right along with her on an exciting jailbreak aboard a train that felt like something out of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” With King, as with the rest of this enviable cast including Idris Elba, I was suddenly not only eager to be on the train but all in for the film.

But whereas “Old Henry” and “The Power of the Dog” used an intentionally slower pace to ease their works towards a suspenseful crescendo, speed, speed, and more speed, is the modus operandi of “The Harder They Fall.” Utilizing anachronistic music and sound effects, dynamic action choreography and jaw-dropping stuntwork, and celebrating not only the color of its cast but color in general with bright eye-popping production and costume design as well as endless movement and buoyancy, “The Harder They Fall” plays like a stylistically western answer to Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann's musical “Moulin Rouge!”

In fact, although Luhrmann has gravitated more to the musical in the past, his home country of Australia has, over the past two decades in films like “Goldstone,” “The Proposition,” and “Red Hill,” become one of the best-kept secrets in modern-day western noir storytelling. And this year, they were at it once again with director Robert Connolly's gorgeous, brooding and haunting import “The Dry,” based on the bestselling novel by Jane Harper.

Shot four-and-a-half hours outside of Melbourne in the flat, dry landscape of the Wimmera region of Victoria with its wide-open spaces that convey both mystery and danger and the secrets of a small, deceptively close-knit community beginning to come undone, “The Dry” feels like a western neo-noir descendant of Carl Franklin's “One False Move” and Steve Kloves' “Flesh and Bone.”

Featuring Eric Bana in one of his best performances since “Munich” and “Chopper,” this moody, dusty tale of character-driven suspense finds his big-city cop returning to the rural community he escaped decades earlier to get to the bottom of two cases. An intelligent, evocative look at the way that the past and the present can coexist simultaneously, "The Dry" has stayed with me since I first saw it last spring.

And it was just one of several films released throughout the year which was centered on the western, crime, or noir standard of a male protagonist still traumatized by the past who's trying to negotiate his life in the present. In fact, two weeks before I reviewed “The Dry” in May of 2021, I covered what I assumed was just going to be a fun popcorn picture from director Guy Ritchie, but turned out to be my favorite action crime movie of the year.

A stripped-down, stealthily efficient '70s style heist revenge movie starring Jason Statham in his first collaboration with Ritchie since 2005's “Revolver,” “Wrath of Man,” is an English language remake of the French thriller “Cash Truck” that Ritchie adapted alongside his frequent screenwriting collaborators Marn Davies and Ivan Atkinson. And it's a sharp left-hand turn for the British helmer away from the hyper-kinetic brand of filmmaking most synonymous with his name.

Boasting a quieter turn by Jason Statham and strong supporting work by Jeffrey Donovan in particular, similar to Jane Campion's “The Power of the Dog,” “Wrath of Man” is a film that you can appreciate even more in your second watch when you realize just how well that Ritchie and Campion are using their sound design, respective scores, and editing team to punctuate every moment with a tense, muscular staccato. For example, unlike the way that the song “Guns Go Bang” by Jay-Z and Kid Cudi is used to create a thrilling, roaring mood in “The Harder They Fall,” Ritchie is more concerned here with the dark side of weaponry in “Wrath of Man.”

Owing not only to the inciting incident which drives Statham's character forward but also to the way that on the soundtrack, Ritchie's film achieves this by repeatedly stopping a dubstep version of Johnny Cash's “Folsom Prison Blues” after the line “don't ever play with guns” instead of conflating his message with Cash's lyrics about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die. And I couldn't help but think as I watched that, as a single, gung-ho filmmaker eagerly playing with guns in movies like "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," Guy Ritchie twenty-three years ago wouldn't have hesitated to include Cash's Reno line as a macho, bullet strewn, coolly nihlistic fuck you. But made today, as a father who's seen his share of violence in the world, suddenly, he knows it's time to pause, and "Wrath" is all the better for it.

The opposite of subtle, “Wrath of Man” isn't as artful as “Dog.” But there's a similar undercurrent here about what makes a man in terms of what they've done in the past, and what they can and should do for a parent or child (even if just in their memory, thereby linking it to “The Harder They Fall” as well), which makes these westerns and films noir riveting to compare and contrast.

These interrogations of the past, and particularly of what one owes a parent and child come back again and again in a handful of other movies I loved this year in all genres. However, staying in this terrain for starters, such questions come to a head while playing with our perception of memory, unreliable narrators, and storytelling in two very different sequels released in '21.

In the first, which technically qualifies as a prequel, “The Many Saints of Newark,” takes us back to the world of HBO's “The Sopranos,” while focusing on the people and places that shaped the character of Tony Soprano, portrayed by the late James Gandolfini in the legendary series but embodied by his son Michael Gandolfini as a younger man here.

A minor player in the drama, which, as the Italian translation of the title “Many Saints” denotes, primarily zeroes in on the Moltisanti family (and is narrated by Michael Imperioli's deceased Christopher Moltisanti in the film), while some people went into “Many Saints” hoping for a continuation of the Sopranos lore, this story of this "thing of ours" is very much its very own, very good thing. Featuring standout performances by veteran character actors, chiefly Alessandro Nivola as Tony Soprano's handsome, charismatic mentor Dickie Moltisanti and Ray Liotta playing dual roles “Hollywood Dick” and Salvatore “Sally” Moltisanti, director Alan Taylor's movie deals with the stories we tell ourselves and others in order to adapt to our environment.

Playing with deception and perception, unsurprisingly for a world that was built around psychoanalysis in "The Sopranos," the leads of "Newark" insulate themselves from any real moments of vulnerability with layer upon layer of toxic swagger and macho bullshit. Wholly wrapped up in justifications and faux narratives, perhaps more for themselves if no one else, in one of the film's most fascinating moments, Liotta's surprisingly self-aware criminal is able to see right through the smiling facade of Nivola's Dickie as he relays his version of tragic events.

Playing out between the two gangsters in the visiting room of jail rather than among cowboys swapping stories across a campfire on the trail, it's thrilling to observe the almost imperceptible raised eyebrow and neutral exhale from Liotta as he realizes that, as though Dickie were his opponent in the poker game of life, he's just spotted a tell. It takes one to know one, after all.

And centered on a different kind of storytelling achieved by revisiting another larger than life alpha male figure that's been part of our worldwide cultural landscape for half a century longer than “The Sopranos,” director Cary Joji Fukunaga served up one searing and surprisingly soulful farewell to Daniel Craig as British spy James Bond in “No Time to Die.”

A film that, like the others in the Daniel Craig era, arrives as a direct sequel to its predecessors, on the surface, “Time” follows the pattern of these films in Craig's run of each masterpiece being directly followed by a 007 entry we'd rather forget. This started with the brilliant “Casino Royale” and abysmal “Quantum of Solace” and repeated once again with another franchise highlight in the form of “Skyfall,” and its disappointing aftermath “Spectre.” Yet while you do need to have seen “Spectre” fairly recently in order to appreciate and understand “No Time to Die,” this film greatly improves upon that misfire and makes us reevaluate them all.

Tonally, it's a film that has far more in common with “On Her Majesty's Secret Service” and the more melancholic outings for Bond than it does with the splashy upbeat entries made by Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan. Played with world-weary resonance by Craig as a man who's been through the wars because the actor has done so as well while making them, here we very much encounter a man who knows that he is on his way out, as much for what he's done and the choices he's made as he is simply out of step in this changing world, along with others (like Vesper Lynd, M, and Felix Leiter) that he's lost along the way.

Ending with a lovely coda for the whole series that stayed with me long after I watched the film (and still now makes me tear up in retrospect), as one character begins to relay the story of James Bond to their child, the universality of this gesture and Bond's legacy shines through for us all. Whether you've had a lifelong affection for the character or only knew of 007 in passing, we've all been that child hearing these stories as well, starting as far back as in Ian Fleming's tattered paperbacks or onscreen with Sean Connery in “Dr. No,” and it's the perfect way for Fukunaga to end it.

Turning fact into fiction or fiction into fact, of course, sometimes parents, like all adults, are the ones who need to tell themselves stories as well in order to survive, and/or to try to accept or change a narrative they're still plagued by. In 2021, while Jake Gyllenhaal starred in an underwhelming English language remake of a vastly superior Danish film called “The Guilty” that did just that in its suspenseful saga of a mother who tells herself tales to cope with reality, his sister Maggie Gyllenhaal found herself dealing with thematically similar foreign terrain as well.

However, this time, in adapting Italian author Elena Ferrante's acclaimed novel “The Lost Daughter” for her feature filmmaking debut, writer-director Gyllenhaal opted to chart her saga of maternal storytelling not from the voice of a male outsider as in "The Guilty," but instead from a woman's point-of-view. The cinematic equivalent of birth control in the way that "The Lost Daughter" is completely uninterested in covering up just how much motherhood can derail your life, Gyllenhaal's boldly uncompromising film chronicles a middle-aged college professor's (Olivia Colman) Greek holiday as she becomes entangled in the plight of a young, overwhelmed mother (Dakota Johnson), which makes her confront her own past choices as a mother as well.

Sparsely written in terms of dialogue, while Ferrante is hard to adapt both for the screen as well as in the English language since you're ultimately translating a translation of a pseudonymous writer (whose gender we, therefore, do not know), everything in this script is cryptic, cutting, and above all critical to the work as a whole. And as the film's main trio of women size each other up with long looks across the beach, or in moments of microaggressions involving lawn chairs and birthday cake, Gyllenhaal knows we're absorbing more about who these people are and what makes them tick than we would in any lengthy monologue. Playing the same character at two different points in her life, Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman give two of the strongest female turns of the year.

Falling back on her years as one of our best character actresses, Gyllenhaal lets "The Lost Daughter" unfold slowly like an intricate piece of origami, collaborating with her cast and crew with ease to create something as startling and unforgettable as it is rare. Stunningly crafted yet fearless, and vitally made in and with the female gaze about females who gaze outward and in, it's the kind of film that's going to hit not only men and women but especially parents and non-parents differently, and one that's above all bound to get us all talking and telling stories of our own.

And, composed of conversations that play out between two couples throughout one emotionally grueling afternoon, that's precisely what happens in actor turned writer-director Fran Kranz's hard-hitting feature filmmaking debut "Mass." Dealing not with the children but rather the adults left in their wake to sort through and pick up all the pieces following a shocking school shooting, as "Mass" begins, a grieving husband and wife (Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton) have agreed to sit down with the parents of the boy (Ann Dowd and Reed Birney) who took their son's life to try to get answers or figure out just who, what, where, when, why, and how everything went so wrong.

A devastating tour de force by the quartet of actors involved, even if by design it feels perhaps more like a filmed play than an artful work of groundbreaking cinema, “Mass” is an auspicious debut from Kranz that's urgent, topical, and impossible to look away from.

Yet whereas the adults in "Mass" are limited by how much they know about what was going on in their children's lives as well as how they choose to interpret their behavior and trauma (as well as someone else's) to preserve their sanity, Brittany S. Hall's character in "Test Pattern" doesn't have the same luxury. Uncertain as to what exactly had happened after she met her friend the night before in a bar, when the intelligent, hard-working Black, twenty-something Texas woman awakens in a strange man's hotel room, the only thing she can focus on is returning home safely to her boyfriend. Doing just that, after her frightened lover begins to fill in some of the blanks of the night she can't remember and she realizes she'd been violated and drugged, the two of them make the decision to go to the ER to complete a rape kit. But as harrowing yet straightforward as their goal is, nothing about this situation is simple.

Sent from one hospital to another where either untrained or disinterested staff half-listen to her request or are unable to help as hours go by and the evidence of the crime threatens to vanish from Hall's body, first-time writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford's "Test Pattern" is the film about rape and trauma that 2020's disingenuous, manipulative "Promising Young Woman" wished it could've been.

Anchored by an incredible performance by Hall and dedicated to exploring double standards for not only women in the United States but Black women in particular, "Test Pattern" is very astute about sexual assault and the way that it impacts everyone involved in the survivor's life differently to drive home the idea that these traumas are never isolated but fluid and ongoing.

It's particularly deft in its understanding of the way that assault makes women feel like they need to apologize for something happening without their consent, and also treat the men in their lives with kid gloves or prioritize their emotions as well as their own discomfort/confusion and embarrassment above all else. Understated and sharp in the filmmaker's approach to, as Gyllenhaal did in "The Lost Daughter," let behavior and even the smallest moments dictate character which we see especially play out as a study of contrasts in the white boyfriend of our Black female character who's unaccustomed to not getting what he wants, this knowing, understated film is as hard to shake as it is rich in food for thought.

Similarly underscoring the limitations and perils of rape reporting for women in the united states where we're often disbelieved (and doubly so for women of color), "Test Pattern" is a stunner of a film that reminds us of the impact that the traumas of the past will continue to have on the present and future, especially when we're uncertain as to what's behind us in our rearview mirror and fear that if the reflection ever sharpens what it might do to our futures as well.

Having weighed on him for twenty years as part of his own very true, very clear secret history that he'd kept hidden to keep himself and his family safe, in one of the very best documentaries of 2021, a man named Amin Nawabi realizes that he can't remotely begin to move on unless he confronts his past.

Winner of the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary, as Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen's animated mixed media work “Flee” opens, Amin Nawabi shares memories of his life and family where he was born in Afghanistan.

Reminding viewers of the documentaries “Waltz With Bashir” and “Persepolis” in Rasmussen's decision to use a compelling tapestry of richly evocative animation to chart its saga with an international biographical focus, as soon as "Flee" begins, we fall under Amin Nawabi's spell as he recalls his past fleeing Afghanistan with his family amid their attempts to find refuge in Europe.

A gay man who, just before his wedding, discerns that he can't run from his past if he expects to have any chance at a happy future, “Flee,” which was executive produced by actors Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, is a masterclass in artfully inventive, intensely personal documentary storytelling. Moreover, it's enhanced tenfold by its unwillingness to deliver a standard by-the-numbers talking head approach to the past.

And thankfully, it's far from the only documentary released over the course of the year that refused to play by genre rules. With its swirling, moving, and competing split-screen images and overlapping of guitar strings, drums, and voices, director Todd Haynes' first feature-length music documentary “The Velvet Underground” serves up the definitive story of the band in such a way that we feel we're experiencing it right from inside Andy Warhol's Factory.

Vibrating on a darkly intoxicating, dissonant frequency that we might've expected to come from John Cale's viola or Sterling Morrison's guitar, Haynes' doc offers new insights about Lou Reed's life from the people who knew him best and importantly, serves as a corrective when it comes to German model, actress, Warhol muse, and singer Nico's involvement with what Cale dubs the band's “banana album.” With Nico painted more like a woman who enjoyed writing poetry and collaborating with others than the “Femme Fatale” diva reputation that the “Femme Fatale” singer has had in pop culture in the years since, “The Velvet Underground” isn't the sole documentary released in 2021 to makes us realize that we've been wrong all along in our assessment of female personnel.

Going a long way to right past wrongs when it comes to the racist and misogynistic lens that Yoko Ono's involvement with John Lennon and The Beatles has been seen through over the past fifty years, in filmmaker Peter Jackson's fly-on-the-wall documentary “Get Back,” he lets Yoko Ono and The Beatles tell us the truth not in retrospect but contemporaneously in their own words and behavior.

Consisting of nearly eight hours of unseen footage that was shot for director Michael Lindsay-Hogg's contentious 1970 documentary “Let it Be” over the course of twenty-one days in January of 1969 before the band broke up, over the course of three installments, we watch as The Beatles work, chat, play, improvise, and fight together while preparing for their legendary rooftop concert and final album.

With Yoko Ono essentially attached at John Lennon's hip, which, according to insiders was one hundred percent the way that Lennon wanted it and contrary to rumors that she was the disruptive force tearing the band apart, throughout “Get Back,” she mostly stays quietly supportive, simply nodding, writing, drawing, or knitting along to the music and all involved.

Chronicling their frustrations and differing styles as musicians who were as close as brothers but have with time and age, begun to drift, while admittedly the middle section of the film, which consists of nearly a full hour of them constantly starting and stopping after the first line of the song “Get Back,” is woefully overlong, it's still an utterly fascinating portrait of these legendary artists at work. Capturing the lightning in a bottle moments where Paul McCartney comes up with the hook and riff of “Get Back,” when George Harrison arrives on set having created his beautifully romantic waltz “I Me Mine,” and more, it's as mesmerizing as it is challenging, which, now we can truly imagine with more authority, was a lot like being in The Beatles.

But while Michael Lindsay-Hogg's documentary crew was busily documenting The Beatles in London in 1969, across the pond here in America another filmmaking crew was hard at work doing the same thing over the span of a six-week summer music festival that took place in Harlem at the same time that man first walked on the moon. Editing all of this footage together, which, as in “Get Back,” had been locked away for fifty years, musician turned director Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's “Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” takes us inside the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.

Not the only music festival that was held in the summer of 1969, which most people know beyond Neil Armstrong's spacewalk as the summer of Woodstock, in this vibrant crowd-pleasing documentary, Questlove makes sure that the predominantly Black artists and audience members of this festival will be overlooked no more. Weaving together performance clips with interviews from both band members and attendees, including one moving sequence where a man realizes that he can, in fact, trust his memory when it comes to the impact that seeing The 5th Dimension perform had on him as a young boy, it's a terrific time capsule of buried history that most of the world, especially white America, did not even know took place.

And while selfishly as a music junkie, I wish that Questlove had included far more musical numbers in their entirety, at the same time, I can appreciate his unwillingness to let the 118 minute “Summer of Soul” go on for the near eight-hour length of “Get Back," and in the way that he wants the people who were there in '69 to help shape its legacy.

Winner of the US Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, "Summer of Soul" was one of the earliest best-reviewed documentaries of the year. Now available to stream on Hulu, it's wonderful to see artists like Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, The Staple Singers, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, and The Chambers Brothers in their prime dazzle you with heart and soul while broadening your scope of time we thought we knew so well gone by.

Interrogating the past through the use of art and culture, while music isn't the driving force of my favorite foreign film of the year, Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi's “Drive My Car” employs the intertextuality of literature and the sound of one's voice in much the same way.

Based on the 2014 Haruki Murakami short story of the same name, which first appeared in the collection “Men Without Women,” “Drive My Car” uses Anton Chekov's 1898 play “Uncle Vanya” as its greatest source of creative inspiration. And though it eventually reminded me of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's “Wild Strawberries” as well, as the film begins, we get acquainted with a married creative couple whose sex life is both a function of and/or fueled by their art.

Opening with a hypnotic, roughly forty-five-minute prologue of sorts that initially makes you think you've wandered into a psychosexual thriller on par with “Eyes Wide Shut” – and doubly so when it's revealed that the writer wife of our actor protagonist (played by Hidetoshi Nishijima) is having an affair with a new young muse – as another tragedy occurs and he suddenly becomes a widower, the film switches gears once again. Evolving into a leisurely humanistic drama, the actor, who always learned his lines by listening to his wife's voice on cassette, finds himself doing so once again in anticipation to stage a new production of “Uncle Vanya” featuring the same dashing yet tempestuous young actor who'd been sleeping with his late wife.

A leisurely paced yet utterly intoxicating three-hour masterwork that requires patience in the way that it lives and breathes along with its leads, as the actor enjoys the ritual of listening to his wife's voice once again in the car, he's forced to let another person in as he's assigned a young female driver who's survived a trauma of her own. Although a triumph in its own right as its tale of two gentle unlikely souls you'd never expect to cross paths suddenly able to recognize the same pain in one another, “Drive My Car” is one of two remarkable, intimately focused empathetic pictures to be crafted by writer-director Hamaguchi in the same calendar year. Even more impressively, both works play like novels on film and are tributes to the courageous act of faith that goes along with deciding who we let into our weird little internal worlds.

But while “Drive My Car” is easily my favorite among the pair of films, which also includes the similarly literary character study “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” “Fortune” deserves far more attention than it's received so far. Composed of three unrelated female-centric storylines, “Fortune,” which was also known as “Coincidence and Imagination,” is less reminiscent of a "Car" style cross between Murakami, Chekov, and Bergman and more like a lost installment from Éric Rohmer's Moral or Seasonal series of tales.

Feeling as though we've just jumped a lane in the middle of traffic from the people having heart-to-heart conversations in Hidetoshi Nishijima's red vehicle at the center of “Drive My Car” to the pair of female friends we first meet in “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” doing the same thing as well, "Wheel" amusingly begins in a car.

In three separate storylines, Hamaguchi focuses on connections missed and made and the way that people drift in and out of our lives at different times. Working quite well as an unrelated film in its own right, it nonetheless expands upon the same existential questions that pervaded “Drive My Car,” which makes this a particularly soulful pair of films to watch together in quick succession. Deepening our understanding when screened thusly, they balance each other out in another unexpected fashion as well as Hamaguchi, having largely switched his focus from the actor at the start of “Car” with the man's female chauffeur by its end, here in the women populated “Wheel” eventually moves the majority of his scope from one gender to the next.

Similarly moving away from the male-dominated films of their past to study the interior life of women on a level that we haven't really seen to such an extent in the filmography of writer-directors Joachim Trier and Paul Thomas Anderson before, we find these men doing just that as we continue on. But, as with “Car” and “Wheel,” you can likewise watch their 2021 releases “The Worst Person in the World” and “Licorice Pizza” separately, these works – both focused on existential coming-of-age, the struggles of self-identity, and young love – play far better if you watch them as a double feature.

An accidental discovery that I made while trying to quickly see as many 2021 screeners as I could to build this list, I went into both of these films – which revolve around two young women struggling to find their way romantically, personally, and otherwise – largely unaware of their plots. And when considering both, it must be said that I related far more to “Licorice Pizza” than I did Trier's otherwise cinematically superior “Worst Person in the World.” Still, sensing I was on the same wavelength of both, I found myself completely unprepared for how much these two masterful movies made by men (just like Hamaguchi's “Car” and “Wheel”) would not only feel familiar to me as a woman but also bring back so many memories of all of the right and wrong men I met at the wrong and right time in my life as well.

“The Worst Person in the World,” is the third and, in my eyes, best film in Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier's Oslo Trilogy, following “Reprise” and “Oslo, August 31.” In it, we meet an ambitious college student (brilliantly played by Renate Reinsve) with an insatiable yet tentative passion for art, life, and love. Impetuous and hungry for both new experiences and inspiration, Reinsve's lead is forever finding herself searching for that next invigorating thing she hopes will fill her up or give her life new meaning, whether that's in terms of her ever-changing major, professional career, or love.

Not so much “trading up” romantically as she catches herself being pulled in unprecedented directions by new men she tries on like new trendy seasonal apparel she hopes might become the backbone of her signature wardrobe, early in "Worst," we watch as Reinsve falls (as we do as well) for a comic book artist (Anders Danielsen Lie). Fifteen years her senior, Lie wisely tells her right off the bat and in no uncertain terms that because they're at different places in their life, any relationship that could happen between the two of them is bound to end badly. Telling us everything we need to know about our leading lady by the way she reacts, predictably, of course, that's when she realizes she's in love with him... or at least, something like it on her own.

Chronicling their tempestuous relationship and the way that sadly sometimes you can either meet the love of your life at the wrong time or realize too late that the level of the affection between you and someone else is heartbreakingly unbalanced, as part of the universal experience of finding one's way in life and love, it's a film that everyone can relate to even if you're nothing like its characters.

I will say that occasionally in “Worst,” it does feel like, as a man, Trier is naturally if perhaps unintentionally empathizing more with the film's male characters he paints in a complex yet slightly better light and this is especially true of the flawed yet unceasingly devoted man played by Lie in particular. However, refreshingly, all the same, his affection for this striving, messy, wistful, aimless yet determined young woman makes the film as surprisingly effervescent as it is compulsively watchable and in it - as his own Audrey Tatou or Anna Karina - Reinsve burns so brightly she could just as well be used as an alternative energy source.

The second major American film of 2021 to feature the son of a late legendary actor (after Michael Gandolfini stepped into his father's role of Tony Soprano in “The Many Saints of Newark"), “Licorice Pizza” stars the son of one of Paul Thomas Anderson's longest, most iconic, and vital collaborators Philip Seymour Hoffman. But in stark contrast to the way that Michael's supporting character and performance in “Many Saints” was easily overshadowed by the titans and sharks among its jaw-dropping cast, the earnest, affable newcomer Cooper Hoffman fills nearly every frame of “Pizza,” which was as inspired by Anderson's own memories of growing up in the valley of Los Angeles in the 1970s as it was by the life of Gary Goetzman.

Yet even though there's a male protagonist at the heart of “Licorice Pizza,” intriguingly (and in a way that's similar to Cameron Crowe's '70s set “Almost Famous” and the movies of Crowe's idol Billy Wilder, including “The Apartment” as well), the heart of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Pizza" undoubtedly belongs to its female lead.

As the twenty-five-year-old object of precocious fifteen-year-old Gary's (Hoffman) misguided affection, musician Alana Haim is utterly magnetic as a woman who not only continues to live at home but also exists in a state of half-adolescent, half-adult arrested development. Aimlessly going from one temporary job to the next as she tries to figure out just what it is she wants to do with herself, Haim's Alana appears to be still operating under that universal misapprehension of youth that there's some external “thing” she needs to find in order for her life to truly begin.

Having crossed paths with a teen ten years her junior who's as confident and settled as she is sunny yet purposeless, when Gary decides to make Alana his new reason for being, it's easy to understand the appeal that having so much unfiltered awe and attention thrust upon you would have on a woman this lost. Still, knowing he's much too young to be romantically serious about, even though it's hard to deny that the two have chemistry to spare, Alana instead vows to remain one of his closest friends, business partners, and confidants.

Oh, and to weigh in on the dreaded age-gap discourse, I must confess that I am very much the wrong person to ask. Having started college at the ripe old age of sixteen after learning to walk again twice from major spine surgery (and therefore having very little in common with boys my own age), I promptly fell for my handsomest classmate... who I realized much too late was not eighteen but actually twenty-five. And even though, like Gary worshiping Alana throughout, we never acted on our mutual attraction and were merely on-campus Spanish study buddies instead, I related to their weirdly charged yet ultimately fruitless placeholder connection hard.

Filled with larger than life characters, including composites of Lucille Ball (Christine Ebersole) and William Holden (Sean Penn), as well as fictionalized versions of Jon Peters (a hilarious Bradley Cooper) and Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), one of the most curious things about “Licorice Pizza” is in just how much Paul Thomas Anderson has committed to making the film's largely male grownup characters feel both like manipulative dinosaurs who treat every interaction as if it were a transaction and are also disingenuous.

When faced with a Hollywood has-been content to call Alana “Breezy” (after the Holden film siren and also, as if she's there to keep him cool) or a closeted politician who is only interested in using her gender to benefit him for the sake of appearances, it's no wonder why Haim's found Gary so refreshing by comparison, even if she knows that he's probably not the one for her either.

Although it's set in the same era as Quentin Tarantino's impressively crafted yet incredibly reactionary “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which, incidentally felt like it was made after Anderson threw down the early '70s L.A. Gauntlet in “Inherent Vice,” its approaches to these sorts of men couldn't be more different. As opposed to Tarantino's film being centered on and far more interested in the feelings of its literal and figurative lady killers, rather than lionizing such figures, "Licorice Pizza" makes us realize that these kinds of wearying men Alana is incredibly right to be suspicious of.

But in stark contrast to the laughter expected as women are pummeled, snore loudly, nag, set ablaze, offer oral sex, barely speak, or take a phone to the face in "Hollywood," in "Pizza," Penn and Cooper's fragile male egos are the opposite of heroic. Amusingly transparent instead, here it's the guileless, meandering, hustling kids who reign supreme. As referenced earlier, much like "Pizza," "Hollywood" also features the children of movie stars... several in fact. Yet, rather than use them as iconography or celebrate that legacy as Anderson does with Hoffman, as an obvious commentary on nepotism in show business, Tarantino instead opts to turn all these famous daughters into the Manson family (which is admittedly brilliant but absolutely pointed as well).

And while there are unfortunately two misguided yet brief moments of mock-Japanese in "Pizza" involving John Michael Higgins as Mikado hotel and restaurateur Jerry Frick that - in painting his character as a prejudiced buffoon - instead come off as mind-blowingly racially insensitive as well (which is another trait shared with the insensitive “Hollywood” portrayal of Bruce Lee), I still prefer this film's honesty about these old white blowhards overall.

Reminiscent of Ally Sheedy's line from “The Breakfast Club” that “when you grow up, your heart dies,” while we know that Gary and Alana - who spend several sequences running, running, always running for shelter - will find their way eventually (and it's important to ask yourself if the last moments of the film are literal or the stuff of either's wish-fulfilling fantasy), it's nice to see Anderson as a storyteller use a feminine lens to try to work out all of these conflicting ideas for himself. Fueled by the sights and sounds of cars and rock 'n roll in the L.A. valley, “Licorice Pizza” is at once both as laid-back and full of promise as a late summer night, and just as much fun.

Looking back on the year, along with Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Power of the Dog,” as well as Renate Reinsve, Olivia Colman, and Alana Haim in “The Worst Person in the World,” “The Lost Daughter," and "Licorice Pizza" respectively, Peter Dinklage delivered another one of my favorite performances of 2021. In perhaps his best role since "Game of Thrones," Dinklage brings to life the sharp-tongued, lovelorn eponymous Cyrano de Bergerac. Directed by masterful “Pride and Prejudice” and “Atonement” helmer Joe Wright, “Cyrano” is an adaptation of Erica Schmidt's 2018 stage musical based upon Edmond Rostand's 1897 play.

Unable to screen Steven Spielberg's new version of “West Side Story” before press time, although I enjoyed the year's adaptation of Lin Manuel Miranda's “In the Heights” quite a bit (and much, much more than “Tick, Tick... Boom,” despite Andrew Garfield's tremendous performance), “Cyrano” is easily my favorite film musical of 2021.

A tour de force turn as the brilliantly witty, sharp-tongued, and sharp sword-wielding French soldier desperately in love with the gorgeous young Roxanne (played by “Swallow” actress Haley Bennett), rather than give Dinklage Cyrano's trademark large nose, the film opts instead to let his stature as a dwarf stand-in for the required “less than desirable trait” he feels would make him untenable for her love. Taken into her confidence after she sees a handsome yet dim soldier Christian (“Luce” and “Waves” star Kelvin Harrison Jr.) who will be fighting in uniform alongside Cyrano, as Roxanne begins to exchange letters with the object of her affection, Cyrano takes it upon himself to be the one to reply for the hopeless Christian.

A play I've always been extremely affected by because as a woman with a spinal disability who's similarly held people at an arm's length for related reasons over the years, as a young girl, it was easy to mentally swap in my condition for Cyrano's nose, especially when played by Steve Martin in “Roxanne.” Therefore, the decision to do something like this with Dinklage instead of just giving a different actor a nasal prosthetic made the film work for me incredibly well on a personal level (and I can only imagine that it was both difficult and cathartic for Dinklage to do something similar as well).

Largely overlooked by critics guilds nationwide, but featuring terrific songs written by Aaron and Bryce Dessner of the band The National as well as stunning production design and slightly blown out, painterly rose, yellow, and ivory-hued impressionistic cinematography, “Cyrano” is a film you won't want to miss.

Destined to fall in between the cracks of the publicity machine that drives so many critics guild award seasons forward (where swag sadly results in nods), I have faith that the star power of Dinklage in front of the camera and Wright behind it will ensure that fans will take note and eventually catch on. Still, "Cyrano" wasn't the only unheralded foreign, indie, or documentary title this year that I'm lucky to have stumbled upon.

In 2021, no indie sleeper won me over nearly as much as actress turned director Natalie Morales' lovely, understated, wonderfully humanistic drama "Language Lessons." Co-written by Morales with Mark Duplass (whose own work as a cinematic storyteller in collaboration with his brother Jay as well as director Lynn Shelton I've responded to repeatedly over the years), I found "Language Lessons" by flipping through an online library of titles and proceeded to fall in love with it so much that I watched it twice in two weeks on my own.

Easily the best film about the importance of human connection during the pandemic that doesn't explicitly deal with the pandemic (and indeed Morales' sweet-natured "Language Lessons" is all the better for it), events unspool in a Zoom-like set-up. As it opens, Duplass' character learns that his wealthy husband has surprised him with two years of conversational Spanish lessons, care of the hard-working, Costa Rica-based online instructor played by Morales. Soon becoming a lifeline for Duplass when tragedy strikes, although Morales' guarded teacher tries to keep things solely on a professional footing, a natural friendship develops between the two through a series of immersive Spanish conversations.

Taking us in some truly unexpected yet all too relatable directions, the drama of the film is heightened all the more thanks to the again external realities of the real-world pandemic. In addition to being drawn to stories about unlikely friends thrown together by common ground or circumstances beyond their control, this film worked as well as it did for me because, whether it's in my weekly pandemic movie club, bimonthly virtual game nights, or podcast interviews with colleagues who've since become friends, "Language Lessons" plays like an autobiographical reflection of these unprecedented years as well.

As someone who never wanted to keep a diary through my teen years when I went through a number of frightening medical woes, I've always used films as markers for my memories and likewise filtered the hardest times of my life through art. I had a similar reaction to this film, which feels like an emotionally safer way to look back at life during the first two years of the pandemic because it approaches this experience in a manner that's more figurative than it is literal. A lovely watch at a time when everything else is beyond our control, in "Language Lessons," Morales and Duplass remind us that no matter what happens, life is infinitely better if we're honest about where we are, what we're going through, and if we check in with the people we love.

Refreshing in the way that “Language Lessons” does this without falling back on a storyline rooted in romantic love, one of my other favorites from last year also focused on the way that one's friends can become a second (or chosen) family.

Vividly animated in bright, warm, bold hues, including an emphasis on blues, magentas, and gold, Italian-American director Enrico Casarosa's sunnily sweet-natured Pixar film “Luca” is one of 2021's most under-discussed treasures. On the surface, it's a male-centric flip-side to something like Disney's contemporary classic “The Little Mermaid,” which found mermaid princess Ariel willing to give up her voice in exchange for legs to use onshore to pursue the man she loves.

In “Luca,” after a young sea-monster in the Italian Riviera meets an outgoing new friend, he discovers that when he touches the dry land of Portorosso, his legs appear naturally. Preferring the adventures in town to his sheltered life under the sea, as Luca begins to explore life away from his protective, loving parents with the two fellow underdogs he feels a kinship with, a whole new world of possibilities and knowledge comes into focus for the first time.

Rooted in the fairytale tradition of a Joseph Campbell style hero's journey (that's become second nature to generations raised on Disney and Pixar), because “Luca” isn't nearly as high-concept as some of a recent venture like “Soul,” it's faced some criticism as a so-called “minor” Pixar venture. Yet, in my eyes, particularly as someone old enough to have seen both Disney's “The Little Mermaid'' and the original “Toy Story” when they were brand new in the theater, there's something both nourishingly wholesome in its familiar, classic, storyline and daringly modern in its unwillingness to clutter it up with any unnecessarily fantastical twists.

It's a very welcome change of pace for a studio that, in the last few years, has seemed to get further and further away from universally relatable characters and plots in favor of something new age or sci-fi. And while that's not to say that their recent works have all been misfires because Pixar will always be the most existential and humanistic of all American animation houses to me, “Luca” was just the right blend of old and new, and a film that felt as steeped in twentieth-century Disney tradition as it is in twenty-first century Pixar.

Far more modern in its concept and scope, however, yet just as focused on human connection as the Pixar film was as well (to the point that its original title was actually “Connected”) is another favorite animated film of '21, “The Mitchells vs. the Machines.” Sharing the same actress who voiced the matriarch in both “Luca” and “Mitchells” in the form of the wonderful Maya Rudolph, this Sony Pictures Animation film benefited from the same CG yet hand-watercolor-painted look of Sony's brilliant “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” The end result is a very welcome return to animated fare that, despite the tens of millions of dollars and cutting-edge technology behind it, not only looks invitingly homemade but is bursting with color, light, and life.

Directed by Mike Rianda (and co-written by Rianda and Jeff Rowe), the film, which is centered on a cross-country family road trip to drop the oldest child off at film school in California, draws on memories that Rianda had about growing up in his family as a young aspiring filmmaker and robot enthusiast. Giving the old-fashioned idea at the heart of “The Mitchells” a decidedly modern, plugged in twist however is a B-storyline about an AI uprising of all robots, appliances, phones, computers, toys, and more operated by the same computer chip (voiced by Olivia Colman) that comes self-aware and decides to try to get revenge on the humans they serve, which soon takes over the narrative.

A fast-paced, frequently funny, wholly original yet relatable LGBTQ friendly family comedy with so many throwaway jokes that fly right by that it truly needs to be watched more than once to even begin to absorb it all, “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” is an animated film that's bound to land differently yet no less successfully across the generations. Made before the pandemic and originally intended to be released in theaters in 2020 before Sony cut their losses and sold the film to Netflix, understandably, it's impossible to watch all of these films on this list in a vacuum and without the existence of Covid-19 suddenly making these tales of the past and human connection feel far more urgent and charged.

Seeing them now, we're unable to be nearly as cynical as we once were about relationships we might've taken for granted, or at least that's the hope anyway, as in times of crisis, we're forced to weigh what's ultimately important to us in the long run. This, after all, is the reason I love film (or Ebert's machines that generate empathy) in the first place. And it's been a great comfort to watch these tales of friends and family members asking themselves the same questions about the tough twenty-four job of life, or as it's said in “Magnolia,” of “walking down the street" throughout 2021 and to see the ways that they look within and battle all comers in order to follow through in spite of it all.

My 2021 Favorites (listed in order of appearance in this article): “The Power of the Dog,” “Old Henry,” “The Harder They Fall,” “The Dry,” “Wrath of Man,” “The Many Saints of Newark,” “No Time To Die,” “The Lost Daughter,” “Mass,” “Test Pattern,” “Flee,” “The Velvet Underground,” “The Beatles: Get Back,” “Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” “Drive My Car,” “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” “The Worst Person in the World,” “Licorice Pizza,” “Cyrano,” “Language Lessons,” “Luca,” and “The Mitchells vs. the Machines.”

I also recommend: “I'm Your Man,” “Final Set,” “Memoria,” “Holler,” “Red Rocket,” “Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” “A Hero,” “Sweet Thing,” “Riders of Justice,” and “In the Heights.”

Fifteen Candles: Notes on Forgetting Our Birthday

2021-12-16T13:58:00.026-07:00

Fifteen Candles:

Notes on Forgetting Our Birthday

by Jen Johans

Today, I'm feeling a little like Molly Ringwald's entire family in “Sixteen Candles,” except in my case, let's make that “Fifteen Candles.” To explain: last week, Film Intuition turned fifteen years old and I completely forgot! The official legal birthdate, I believe, is December 9. That's when, so many years ago, I registered my blog as an LLC and properly gave it its own URL courtesy of Yahoo, which then became Illuminate, then Aabaco, and is now Verizon, but who knows which merger and name change tomorrow will bring. (Speaking of mergers, I had to ax my old site layout and lost our extensive review index but will try to create a new one with review links in '22.)

First, however, I'll kick things off with a little history: I started the site originally through Blogger in the fall of 2006 as a project for my self-designed Film Studies baccalaureate program. I devoted my focus to movies made by women since there wasn't a whole lot of information available about the subject either online or in print at the time. In fact, that's actually why the website has a female-centric, female intuition-based name. Nonetheless, soon after I launched the blog, I fell in love with my classic and contemporary noir coursework and decided to broaden my website's scope to all of cinema as the year ended and I graduated from film school.

Having essentially gone to college off and on since I was 16 years old (where I quickly realized that it was my goal to never stop learning), at 25, my nerdy constant quest for film knowledge was a hard habit to break. So I did what I'd done for years, and especially what I'd done when I couldn't go to school due to multiple spine surgeries or chronic pain. I kept up my research by buying old film textbooks online as well as from used bookstores. I also continued writing blog entries... so many blog entries.

December 9, 2007 marks the date when I changed the Blogspot address to an official legal one (and when I started to repost old reviews in the new set-up), but by the time this happened, I had loyal readers, and had written hundreds of short pieces in a single year. While some of those early posts, I'm sure, are quite cringe-worthy, over the next 15 years, I amassed a database of more than 2,500 reviews. Since I don't know the date I started the first version of the blog in 2006, I've decided to keep December 9 for that too!

As all Type As will tell you, like anything worth doing, throughout its history, this site has brought me joy and stress in equal measure. Most importantly, though, it served as my launchpad or industry calling card and led me to such places as working as a grant and festival guide summary writer for the Scottsdale International Film Festival. Continuing on in the field, one of my favorite things I've ever done was curate and host a film discussion series at the Scottsdale Public Library, where I also lectured and ran discussions on behalf of the Holocaust Museum and Film Movement. It was around this time that I began freelancing for some wonderful sites, including Indiewire, DVD Netflix, The Phoenix Film Festival blog, BlogCritics, Rupert Pupkin Speaks, Hardboiled Wonderland, and more.

Absolutely my creative outlet when I developed a rapidly worsening systemic disease in my 30s and officially became disabled, I can't tell you how much having film to focus on meant to me over the years when I was going through multiple departments at the Mayo Clinic, etc. and stumping every doctor in sight with my strange and scary test results. (In fact, it's taken until just before age 40 to get a proper diagnosis of a very rare genetic immune disorder which I discovered I've actually had since birth! If you're in the same situation where you're still searching for answers, please keep looking, surround yourself with people you trust, undergo good university level genetic testing, and stay strong.)

In celebrating this birthday, first and foremost, I want to thank all of the readers for being there even after my review output became sporadic. Of equal importance are the many encouraging filmmakers, writers, and actors, plus the PR and studio representatives who had both faith in me and placed value on my writing years before I became an official Rotten Tomatoes or Cherry Picks certified reviewer. Additionally, I want to extend my gratitude to the colleagues who've treated me with respect in a cold and increasingly dire industry early on, along with those who've asked me to write for and work with them over the years and invited me to join their critics' associations as well.

I'm always humbled when someone seeks out a movie based on something I've reviewed or sees that I've written a new essay on a film and then watches it first just so they can read it. To this end, I've heard from so many of you, along with a cross-section of performers and filmmakers whose work I so admire, and it's both greatly touched me and also kept me going. A note to all readers: I sincerely apologize for removing comments on my site so many years ago but I wanted to spend my time creating as opposed to refereeing fights between strangers. Still, I'm quite easy to reach online and love hearing from you on social media, whether that's via FilmIntuition on Twitter, Patreon, Letterboxd, and/or Instagram.

As my regular readers are undoubtedly well aware, after becoming burned out from steadily churning out movie reviews for so long, in March of 2020, I launched the podcast Watch With Jen™ over at my FilmIntuition Patreon. It's since become available on Spotify, Apple, Audible, and every podcast platform in between, except YouTube (where we are unaffiliated with the new YouTube channel that launched in September that is currently titled Watch With Jen but in the process of changing).

A beacon of light in the midst of a horrible pandemic, while things started out small as I merely recommended movies you might not have heard of otherwise and also started interviewing people I admired, the Watch With Jen™ podcast has since evolved into a fun, research-intensive, in-depth exploration of the films, actors, directors, and mediums that inspire us most. I love collaborating with each guest on a topic of their choosing and we treat each episode like a Film Studies survey course we're taking together with the audience. We hit the 100th episode landmark in August and have kept going strong, with awesome plans for upcoming shows in '22, some of which I'll be unveiling soon on social media and Patreon.

Yesterday, I uploaded the final episode of season 2 and I am completely honored to have had on so many amazing guests this year, including: author Megan Abbott (“The Turnout”), author S.A. Cosby (“Razorblade Tears”), author William Boyle (“Shoot the Moonlight Out”), actor James Urbaniak (“Difficult People”), critic/podcaster Blake Howard (“One Heat Minute”), historian/podcaster/author Karina Longworth (“You Must Remember This”), author/screenwriter Jordan Harper (“Hightown”), author Nikki Dolson (“Best American Mystery & Suspense Stories 2021”), screenwriter/author Chris Cantwell (co-creator, producer, and showrunner of “Halt and Catch Fire”), critic/historian/author/podcaster Jason Bailey (“Fun City Cinema”), critic Bilge Ebiri (Vulture), author/blogger Jed Ayres (Hardboiled Wonderland), critic/author/historian Walter Chaw (FilmFreakCental), critic Sean Burns (WBUR), critic/historian Sheila O'Malley (The Sheila Variations and RogerEbert.com), author/critic Adam Nayman (“David Fincher: Mind Games”), critic Tomris Laffly (RogerEbert.com), critic Nell Minow (RogerEbert.com), filmmaker BenDavid Grabinski (“Happily”), as well as our gifted logo/merchandise designer Kate Gabrielle (KateGabrielle.com), and many more.

In writing news, this year my review of “The Velvet Underground” documentary was cited in "The L.A. Times" and I contributed an essay about the film “The Chicago Syndicate” to the UK Blu-ray box set release of Columbia Film Noir #4. In addition to finding my words printed on a few DVD boxes (thank you to Film Movement, in particular), I was quoted in the advertising of NY's Quad Cinema for the film “Final Set,” and also wrote one of my all-time favorite pieces for DVD Netflix on actor David Morse as well.

I'm greatly looking forward to what 2022 will bring and hope that I continue to deliver both the pieces you'd love to read here on FilmIntuition (and elsewhere) and the podcasts you'd like to listen to as well. For the curious, once I get caught up on all of my film screeners and voting in our various critics' organizations, I will be working on my Best Films of 2021 list, which I hope to have available to you right around the second week of January.

In the meantime, please don't hesitate to reach out to me via social media if you ever have any questions and I want to thank you so much for devoting some time to my work. While I'm pretty sure I'd always be writing or talking about movies to random strangers regardless, I wouldn't do any of this at all if it wasn't for your loyalty, interest, patronage, and support. On behalf of myself, Film Intuition, and Watch With Jen™, I'm wishing you and yours a safe and happy holiday season and happy movie watching.

Watch With Jen™ - Podcast launched 3/3/20 (Trademark Pending) Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Netflix Holiday Movie Review: Single All the Way (2021)

2021-12-02T00:02:00.112-07:00

Like putting new lenses in a beloved old pair of glasses, this week's sharply written, sweet-natured gay Netflix holiday romcom gives us a fresh look at a familiar genre.

Wisely and earnestly leaning into the tropes of a Christmas romance, in the quick-witted charmer “Single All the Way,” screenwriter Chad Hodge (who created one of my favorite little-seen TV shows of the late 2010s in “Good Behavior”) wins us over with his sincere affection for the films he's using as a jumping-off point.

To this end, when we first meet our adorable yet perpetually unlucky in love protagonist Peter (Michael Urie), he's disappointed once again after another short-lived romance goes down in flames. As tired of working on social media ad campaigns in Los Angeles as he is being single, when Peter begins making plans to visit his family in New Hampshire for the holidays, he ropes his oldest friend and roommate Nick (Philemon Chambers) into coming home with him and posing as his new boyfriend.

Not wanting to lie to a family that's come to mean almost as much to him as Peter, Nick begrudgingly goes along with Peter's plan. However, just when you think you've seen this movie before, almost as soon as they arrive at his parent's house, a wrench is thrown into the proceedings by Peter's jubilant mother Carole (Kathy Najimy).

Appearing on the scene with her newest homemade sign “Sleigh Queen,” before Peter and Nick can deliver their white lie, Carole decides to play another one of the romcom genre's greatest hits by happily announcing that she's set her son up on a blind date with her hunky spin instructor James (Luke Macfarlane).

But while his mom is content to try to craft a new romance for her son (like it's just one of the many signs she gives as gifts and hangs throughout the home), the rest of his family decides it's time to bring Peter and Nick together once and for all. Sensing not only their obvious chemistry but perhaps the lingering looks sent Peter's way by Nick, Peter's father (Barry Bostwick) and nieces make it their holiday mission to make this vital love connection. Gradually, they bring an amused, if torn, Nick into the fold.

Whether you're a devotee of the endless holiday romcoms produced by the Hallmark Channel or Lifetime every year, or your favorites are the classics like “The Shop Around the Corner,” and Christmas in Connecticut,” etc., or you stick with the treacly yet wicked wit of British comedies like “Bridget Jones's Diary” or “Love Actually,” romance fans know precisely where this film is headed almost as soon as it starts.

Yet rather than run from the genre conventions we routinely see in these traditionally straight romances, “Single All the Way” uses them as vibrant, positive building blocks to show that love is love, family is family, and it's both all relative and universal. Proving this, it layers in a variety of beloved romcom mainstays from its small-town setting (as Peter wonders if he should move back home) and a friends to lovers plotline to a dance number (to Britney, bitch!) and romantic hijinks care of quirky relatives, including an obligatory scene where the two leads must share a bed.

Along the way, "Single" incorporates an amusing, if undercooked subplot involving a community Christmas pageant called “Jesus H. Christ” that's the brainchild of Peter's colorful Aunt Sandy, who's played by Jennifer Coolidge. Much like Najimy gives the film a needed shot of candy-cane-coated adrenaline as soon as we see her, with her warmth, humor, and vivacity, veteran Christopher Guest scene-stealer Coolidge buoys her part of the film, which, unfortunately, plays like a rushed afterthought.

Guided by a steady hand, “Single All the Way” was helmed by the versatile Michael Mayer, who directed the moving, gorgeously acted but woefully underseen adaptation of “A Home at the End of the World,” as well as the excellent “Flicka” and “The Seagull.” Mayer knows how to work with actors and it shows.

With so much - at times, too much - going on throughout, although it's easy to predict that of course, Peter will end up with Nick, “Single All the Way” is a loving, spirited ensemble film that never runs out of plot. Tonally, as sunny and bright as the visuals are snowy and cozy, and filled with terrific turns by a talented cast that's ready for anything (including “Schitt's Creek” star Jennifer Robertson), as someone who watches a lot of these films, “Single All the Way,” greatly exceeded my expectations.

Succeeding where last year's well-intentioned, star-studded, but ultimately disappointing Hulu film “Happiest Season” failed, while I'm speaking merely as a straight film critic, it feels truly rewarding and vital for audiences to see an LGBTQ holiday romantic comedy that doesn't make coming out or lying to one's family the main character's entire narrative arc. Similarly fighting against other gay movie tropes where its protagonist desperately wants to escape their small town and go to the big city or make their parents understand their lifestyle, it's refreshing instead to see Bostwick and Najimy scheme and plan to get their son happily coupled up.

By making the sexuality of its characters secondary to everything else going on, "Single All the Way" cleverly sidesteps the need for any moral speechifying that would pull us out of the storyline and ring false. Respecting our maturity and intellect right from the start, Mayer's film counts on its audience to have already come to the realization that we all deserve love, not to mention contemporary, clear-eyed, re-framed romantic movies for one and all that are this heartfelt, genuine, and fun.

Text ©2021, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Netflix Holiday Movie Review: “A Boy Called Christmas” (2021) & “A Castle for Christmas” (2021)

2021-11-26T00:02:00.249-07:00

The Netflix equivalent of putting up your Christmas tree and/or starting your holiday shopping the day after Thanksgiving, this year, the streaming service's version of Black Friday comes in two new high profile, high caliber Christmas movies which are scheduled to premiere on Friday, November 26.

Inspired by the question “was Father Christmas ever a boy?” which was posed by author Matt Haig's son, the first film, from “Monster House” director Gil Kenan, is a gorgeously crafted, old-fashioned fairytale adaptation of Haig's bestselling 2015 British children's book “A Boy Called Christmas.”

Tonally a cross between C.S. Lewis, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens, J.K. Rowling, and Roald Dahl in its balance of darkness, magic, heart, and light, Kenan's film begins with a framing device straight out of “The Princess Bride.”Arriving at their home late at night, a great aunt played by the irreplaceable Maggie Smith tells the tale of the brave boy we'll all eventually know as Father Christmas to her young relatives at bedtime. Next, switching to a different time and place, we move away from contemporary London as Smith's fable starts to play out before our eyes.

Still reeling from the loss of his mother, which is something shared by the characters in the modern setting as well, “Christmas” chronicles the plight of Nikolas (portrayed by top-notch relative newcomer Henry Lawfull). Fearing for the safety of the sole parent he has left (Michiel Huisman), Nikolas sets out on a perilous journey to the north to find his dad when he fails to return from his search for the village of Elfhelm in order to bring hope to us all.

Populated by a who's who of great character actors, including Sally Hawkins, Kristen Wiig, Jim Broadbent, Toby Jones, and Stephen Merchant (priceless here as the voice of Miika the Mouse), the film looks and sounds like a dream, thanks to the effects team and production designer behind the “Paddington” movies, and a lovely score courtesy of the great Dario Marianelli. Additionally, it's fun to see the actors let loose, particularly Hawkins and Wiig who relish their Wicked Witch-like moments to eat up the screen.

The type of film you could leave on in the background when you make cookies or put up your tree, while it's easy to lose yourself in the snowy spectacle of it all, disappointingly from a narrative standpoint, “A Boy Called Christmas” runs out of steam quickly. With episodic plot points, as the indefatigable, ever-determined, delightful Lawfull encounters one new character or problem after another in a by-the-numbers fashion, it grows increasingly repetitive as it continues on.

Although I am unfamiliar with the source material, I can't help but ask if perhaps its error might be an early “Harry Potter” franchise-style case of staying far too faithful to the book. Needless to say, of course, young fans of Haig's novel are sure to love seeing every moment come to life. For the rest of us, however, despite some beautiful revelations that come to light near the end of the movie, its muddled second act makes it feel twice as long as the first, and I think most viewers who don't know Haig's novel will grow restless as soon as the storyline begins to wander.

Still, from the jaw-dropping 4k presentation where even the opening sequence of Smith walking down a light-filled city street feels painterly (and indeed I wondered but really didn't care if it was CG), “A Boy Called Christmas” is a stellar technical achievement from these talented craftsmen, even if it doesn't fully work for me as a film overall. Not nearly as successful as “Monster House” or Kenan's wonderful adaptation of “City of Ember,” (of which I might be the only fan and still wish for a sequel), he's such a great director that regardless of the film's shortcomings, I look forward to seeing what he'll do next.

Incidentally, it turns out that looking forward is exactly what romance author Sophie Brown (Brooke Shields) realizes she needs to do at the start of director Mary Lambert's picturesque holiday romcom travelogue “A Castle for Christmas.”

Whereas “A Boy Called Christmas” was made for the kids, “A Castle for Christmas” is Netflix's present for teens and adults. It comes in the form of a fun, fluffy, snowflake light hybrid of the kinds of seasonal romances that Lifetime and the Hallmark Channel produce with alarming frequency and the sassier UK romcoms that Hugh Grant made popular back in the '90s.

Centered on Shields' Brown, the plot of "Castle" is incredibly straightforward. Having killed off the romantic hero of her dozen bestselling novels after a messy divorce, Sophie Brown incurs the wrath of her heartbroken legion of fans who want their dream man back. In desperate need of a change of scenery, she journeys to Scotland to not only hide out and write the next book in her popular Emma Gale romance series but also visit the castle that her late father loved while growing up as the son of the groundskeeper there.

Having barely arrived in her new surroundings, Sophie finds new friends quickly when she joins the knitting club in the pub of the inn where she's staying. The same dynamic we encountered in Netflix's outstanding (and much more substantive) adaptation of the acclaimed novel “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society," in “Castle,” the scenes that producer-star Shields shares with her motley knitting crew are absolutely delightful.

Still, as the romance author she's portraying here knows, you can't have a love story without a male lead, and thankfully, for that we have Cary Elwes getting his scowl on as the sour, curmudgeon-like Duke of said castle, who eventually melts under Sophie's charms.

Phenomenally predictable to anyone who's ever seen a romantic comedy before, while the pair are excellent in their roles, Sheilds and Elwes' chemistry does leave a little something to be desired, although that's likely more the fault of their underdeveloped characters than the actors in question, who aren't given a whole lot with which to work.

One of those movies where the credits reveal that it was written by a committee of four different writers, it feels like certain screenwriters were hoping to emphasize the knitting club as well as develop a potential B or C romantic subplot, and others were more clearly focused on the castle angle. All in all, it's a bumpy yet nonetheless, above-average cheery holiday romance.

Featuring a welcome cameo by Drew Barrymore that bookends the film as she first appears in a slightly cringeworthy over-the-top introduction to Sophie Brown who loses it live on Barrymore's talk show (which Shields plays too broadly), Barrymore returns at the end during the final credits in a very funny two-hander between the two women.

Targeted to Gen X, it's ideally suited to those from the era who grew up watching Shields and Barrymore, were dazzled by Lambert's iconic Madonna music video “Like a Prayer,” and frightened by her adaptation of “Pet Semetary,” and fell in love with “Castle” leading man Cary Elwes in “The Princess Bride.” And indeed, Netflix is smart to aim for this demographic.

Usually overlooked in seasonal fare that's often developed with late teens and early twenty-somethings in mind, “A Castle for Christmas” is just the pleasantly diverting, if ultimately forgettable thing to settle in with after you spend Thanksgiving in the kitchen and Black Friday setting up that tree and/or starting to shop. With so much holiday stress on the horizon, 'tis the season for snowy movies after all.

Movie Review: The Velvet Underground (2021)

2021-10-13T10:54:00.004-07:00

Now Available

Dig the scene. In the middle of the 1960s, a former New York Polish wedding and social hall nicknamed The Dom could for weeks at a time be the musical residency of The Velvet Underground as they played night after night with the experimental films of Andy Warhol and company projected larger-than-life on the wall behind them. Colorful, spinning psychedelic lights that bounced off surfaces in all directions were usually operated by the first person who volunteered when Warhol asked if anyone knew how to work the equipment. Occasionally this led to mishaps where bulbs broke and spotlights fell from the balcony when they were operated by someone with more confidence and amphetamines than any real technical know-how.

Ignoring this, on the ballroom floor below, patrons danced – not just people, but a wide cross-section of East Coasters. Filling The Dom, you could find bikers, drag queens, juvenile delinquents, Harvard professors, art collectors, poets, leftover Beats who hadn't gone west to San Francisco, the kind of arty junkies who flooded in and out of The Factory throughout the decade, future “Chelsea Girls,” as well as Warhol's influential friends like Jackie Kennedy and Walter Cronkite. On a given evening, they'd be there side-by-side, milling and dancing next to some broken lights, next to someone with broken dreams, listening to some intentionally broken chords as they struggled not to break amid the overwhelm of polka dots, spirals, mazes, and avant-garde imagery going on around them.

It was a scene of too much too-muchness. But strip away the visual spectacle and "anti-elite elite" hobnobbing, just focus on the sound, and the same can be said for the music of the Underground. A sort of dissonant bubble-gum rockabilly filled with viola strings that sounded like saws, drums straight out of Bo Diddley, the droning, deliberate delivery of guest vocalist Nico, a searing guitar, and stream-of-consciousness lyrics about drugs, sex, and the New York streets outside, the sound alone was brutal, beautiful, bold, brilliant, and played on all the senses at once.

With so much to take in, is it any wonder it didn't last? Is it any wonder it was chaos? And is it any wonder that it still sounds so fresh – so much like the act of creativity in process – that it still inspires us fifty-five years later?

Seeking to not only encapsulate and explore the roots and history of both the band and the scene from the people who lived to tell the tale but also do so in a way that brings a night at The Dom or The Factory to viewers watching it today, with “The Velvet Underground,” director Todd Haynes has released his first full-length musical documentary. And fittingly, especially from a man who once told the Karen Carpenter story with Barbie dolls and made the nonlinear, arty film “I'm Not There” about Bob Dylan, it's much more avant-garde than it is VH1 Behind the Music.

It opens with dueling yet complementary narratives of The Velvet Underground's own version of Wilson and Love, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, and Page and Plant. In Haynes' film, portraits of the band's eventual founders Lou Reed and John Cale as emotionally and creatively frustrated young artists emerge, which foreshadow both their future promise as well as the way that their two titanic personalities will only temporarily harmonize in mutual dissonance before they can hold that note no longer.

Paying the most attention to those two figures, with the scales tipping more in favor of the man who was with the band the longest in Reed, the documentary chronicles the way they came with ample baggage from vastly different backgrounds before impossibly finding one another in New York. Reed, then working as a fast songwriter and musician for hire, first collaborated with the Welsh-born multi-instrumentalist on an insanely catchy forgotten dance single called “The Ostrich,” but rather than a one-off thing, their passion for improvisational composition bonded the two right from the start.

While Reed, who sought inspiration in poets like Ginsberg and Rimbaud, longed to translate his raw, gritty, profane poetry into rock hits in a way similar to The Rolling Stones, Cale loved experimenting with new modes of expression using tones, drones, and dissonance, and spent his time studying with the avant-garde musicians of the day. Bonded by their otherness, their loathing of the mainstream, and determination to go against the status quo, once they got together with guitarist Sterling Morrison, and drummer Maureen “Mo” Tucker (replacing Angus MacLise), they sought to bring high art to the gutter, and still make it something people wanted to hear, whether they could dance to it or not.

From the in-name-only Warhol produced “Banana Album” with Nico to Reed eventually firing Warhol (without the band's input) so they could go on to push the limits even further with “White Light/White Heat” and more, this lineup was as revelatory as it was combustible.

Ego, attitudes, communication breakdown, and infighting – all accelerated by drugs, insecurity, posturing, jealousy, uncertainty, and the era – in the film, we're given an engrossing “he said," "she heard," "I think," "you recall,” overview of the band. And along the way, Haynes worries less about fact-checking, follow-ups, or sourcing certain claims than he does in making his “Velvet Underground” vibrate on a darkly intoxicating, dissonant frequency that we might've expected to come from Cale's viola or Morrison's guitar.

Like something straight out of The Dom, it's filled with art, imagery, and colorful flashing lights to the point that it should come with a warning for those with epilepsy or migraine light sensitivity. While admittedly, there are times I longed for more details about certain songs (“Heroin” gets the lion's share of the screen-time) as well as the post-Nico and Cale albums or more analysis of the personnel changes, it's all told with so much affection, color, and vigor that it immediately draws you in with its too much too-muchness. An exhaustively covered period in music and pop culture journalism, Haynes' version of the events adds more humanity, humor, and warmth to the proceedings than one might expect when contrasted by the coolly detached handling of the Velvets in past docs.

Feeling like we're with the band rather than just dryly reverential of Warhol, Cale, or Reed, there are no villains in “The Velvet Underground.” To this end, I applaud the decision here to invite Reed's sister to weigh in about the often biased chronicling of the shock treatment era in her brother's adolescence. Similarly, the film gives Nico more respect as a poet and professional than she normally receives, and treats Warhol as more of a friend, facilitator, and minor figure rather than the driving force behind the band, in a way that feels right and overdue. Also welcome is the way Haynes refuses to gloss over the drugs or the misogyny of The Factory that treated women as currency where their value came only in their physical appearance. Even if the latter gets a brief mention, it's reassuring that he's unwilling to simply romanticize all things Warhol as other filmmakers have done in the past and instead allow some of the degradation and darkness – incidentally the two things Reed liked in sex – to rightfully permeate this chronicling of events.

A labor of love by a filmmaker who's so enamored of the band and era that one of his earliest big studio movies for Miramax was the unfairly maligned glam rock opus “Velvet Goldmine,” “The Velvet Underground” is a documentary that, in tribute to its subject, is as artful as a film as it is experimental. Neither as dryly objective as a more academically minded PBS doc nor as full of insider-only information that those unfamiliar with the band won't still be able to appreciate, it's a seductive mix of both approaches plus something wholly its own. And to Haynes' great credit, “The Velvet Underground” plays halfway between a night of excess and broken glass at The Dom and the after-party where you leave the lights and the dance floor behind you to just hang – somewhere in NY, somewhere underground, somewhere dangerous – with the band.

Netflix Movie Review: The Guilty (2021)

2021-09-28T17:12:00.005-07:00

Arriving 10/1 on Netflix

If you haven’t seen “The Guilty,” you should see “The Guilty.” Let me try this again. If you’ve seen “The Guilty,” you might like “The Guilty.” No, that’s still not quite right. It might help if I tell you that there are two versions of “The Guilty.” There’s the original 2018 Danish film from director Gustav Möller, which was one of the year’s very best movies, and then there’s the new American remake directed by Antoine Fuqua, which debuted last week in theatres in selected cities and will arrive on Netflix on October 1.

Knowing this, I'm sure you can probably guess which of the two pictures I prefer because that's usually the way it goes with remakes of foreign films that frequently lose something vital in the English translation (just like all too often, the book is better than the movie). Of course, there are definite exceptions to this, but in the case of “The Guilty,” it isn't enough just to say that, yes, as predicted, the original version of the film is far superior to the American remake.

Because as a work, it is utterly dependent upon a few major plot revelations that slowly and methodically unfurl over the course of its very stressful roughly ninety-minute running time, since Fuqua's “The Guilty” adheres very closely to Möller's own film, the version you see first might just dictate which one you prefer.

Set over the course of a very long night in a 911 emergency call center in Los Angeles, as Fuqua's film opens, we meet a police officer who has been temporarily reassigned during an investigation into some sort of conduct violation that we learn more about later on.

In the midst of L.A.'s fire season where the calls are coming in hot and the air is so smoky and polluted that it's exacerbating his asthma something fierce, Jake Gyllenhaal's Joe answers incoming distress calls with the same degree of breathless disdain, cynicism, and entitlement with which he used to patrol the city's streets. Whether it's people requesting help because they took too much speed or were robbed by a hooker (both incidents play out exactly as in the original), Joe counts down the minutes until his hearing the next day, after which he hopes to get off the phones and go back on the beat. However, suddenly, a call comes in that does the unthinkable; it makes Joe not only care but also get very involved.

A woman's (Riley Keough) voice comes in on the line speaking to Joe as though he were her child. But before he disconnects from what he assumes is a wrong number, something in the timbre of her voice stops him. Shaky, tear-filled, and in a state of panic she's trying to hide, when he hears a man (Peter Sarsgaard) ask her who she's talking to, Joe starts piecing together the narrative that she's been abducted by her husband by asking the woman yes or no questions only.

Barely able to sit still in his chair – his jittery hand forever fondling his inhaler because he knows it's only a matter of time before he runs out of breath once again – he becomes a cop again before our eyes. Demanding help from the California Highway Patrol and others who are inundated by fire, crises, and crime calls of their own, Joe tries to route squads to pull over a white van traveling eastbound on the I-10 and also send cars to her home to check on these children that she keeps talking about.

Getting even more frantic when they get disconnected and she doesn't answer the phone, he calls her home to talk to her young daughter who helps Joe fill in a few more blanks. Rather than be the first one out the door from his final shift, he abruptly refuses to leave until he sees this case through to the end. Restrained by legal red tape, jurisdictional issues, and bureaucracy, Joe eventually goes into an isolated room, closes the blinds, and devotes the rest of the film's running time to trying to bring Keough's Emily Lighton home safely.

That old macho rage at a forefront – for reasons both good and bad – he makes a request to his loyal sergeant (voiced by Ethan Hawke) to go and kick some doors in when the more he hears and uncovers about Emily, the more alarmed he becomes. But is he really listening or is he working out his own personal issues with regret as a father in the midst of marital strife? Is he fighting to save Emily or himself?

Both versions of “The Guilty” serve as a reminder that whenever one interacts with emergency services in the form of police, fire, or paramedics, it's on one of the worst days of our lives. Communication, as the works reveal, is at the forefront of our experience, and limits are placed on what gets conveyed, understood, the authority figure's abilities to help (read: not hurt), and whatever they're going through on their own as well.

Where the two works differ greatly is in terms of their approach. Subtle, whittled down, and respectful enough of the audience's intelligence not to give us a lot of overt messages, excuses, spell everything out, or punctuate every new revelation with an intrusive score, Möller's “The Guilty” is masterful in the way it slowly builds to its unbearably tense conclusion.

In stark contrast, anyone who's seen a film by Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day,” “Southpaw,” “Olympus Has Fallen,” etc.) knows that subtlety is not his strong suit. The new "Guilty" is utterly overstuffed, both with the baggage of Joe and the gravity of America in the present moment. Filled with symbolism, from the fires raging outside and internally in Joe to that damn inhaler, and punctuated with cacophonous sound to drive his points home via a score that “tells” you what and how to feel, "The Guilty" is a lot to absorb without a headache. Also, it's loaded with explanations for behavior that in some ways augment the film by commenting on the problems faced in our country and in others, just play like speechifying sound bites.

Whereas the original film (which Gyllenhaal first saw at Sundance in 2018 and knew immediately he wanted to remake) was content to let the battles within his dynamic main character come to the forefront as needed and often in his micro-expressions or through actor Jakob Cedergren's eyes, the new version makes our lead much more vocal, demonstrative, and unhinged. One of the strongest American actors of his generation, Gyllenhaal is more than up to the task to bring humanity to what is largely a one-man show, save for the remarkable contributions by members of its vocal cast, including Keough, Sarsgaard, Hawke, Paul Dano, and others.

But while the film goes big when it should go little, its tendency to push to the extreme lessens as it continues, when Fuqua, his cinematographer, and editor pull back slightly, and Gyllenhaal dials the bravado down several notches. As someone who grew up around cops, let me be the first to say that they most definitely have a Cop Voice, Cop Manner, and Cop Behavior. And just like when someone gets out of the military, it takes some time for them to leave that behind and just assimilate with the rest of us, Fuqua – who's made many movies dealing with this very thing as both director and producer – understands this well. Gyllenhaal's Joe learns to modulate his voice and behavior the longer he's on the phone with Emily and the film is better for it.

Still, though, the first chunk of his “Guilty,” which was written by “True Detective”'s Nic Pizzolatto (though by their own admission somewhat rewritten by Fuqua and Gyllenhaal), plays like a dropped character and subplot that was edited out of “Training Day.” Far more of an extreme contrast than we truly need as Joe evolves over the course of the movie, as I watched this one, I kept thinking of not only the original Danish production but also Steven Knight's brilliant UK movie “Locke,” from 2013 as well.

Truly a one-man show in terms of actors on the screen, in Knight's film, we see Tom Hardy's character answer a phone call on a drive home that changes everything for him. Something as simple as which direction he's going to go and what he's going to do next has life-altering stakes, and just like in both versions of “The Guilty,” made a few years later, the film's drama comes from his interactions with others whose voices we hear on the other end of his various calls.

Shot in real-time as Hardy made the same drive each night and went through the same emotional drama only a handful of times as if it were a play, both versions of “The Guilty,” were shot similarly. Yet instead of just letting it play out real-time over 90 minutes with Hardy in a car and the cameras ready to go the whole time, both “Guilty” productions were completed in shoots ranging from 11 (Fuqua) to 13 (Möller) days. But by focusing less on manufacturing drama and more on letting it play out on its own, both “Locke” and the original version of “The Guilty” work so much better with far less artifice than the 2021 rendition of the latter.

In the end, of course, Fuqua's film might still be worth watching if you liked Möller's original “Guilty" and are curious what the new incarnation might look like Americanized, with all of these gifted actors, and with the volume turned way, way up. But if you've never pressed play on the original, I'd highly recommend seeing both "Locke" and “The Guilty” before you see “The Guilty,” to see how to tell the story of a man on a phone at a crossroads in his life right.

Blu-ray Review: Breakdown (1997)

2021-09-27T18:17:00.010-07:00

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“The Lady Vanishes” is not just an early Hitchcock movie that writer-director Jonathan Mostow vividly remembers seeing as a kid, it’s also the premise of his big 1997 Hollywood breakout hit “Breakdown.” As tautly wound as a garrote and nearly as treacherous, shortly into the film, after a couple's brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee breaks down in the middle of the desert, Amy (Kathleen Quinlan) leaves her husband (Kurt Russell) with the car and accepts a lift into town with a seemingly friendly trucker (J.T. Walsh) before she vanishes like the sun setting in the west. Determined to get her back, even after a cop helps him confront trucker Red Barr (Walsh) who pretends he’s never seen Jeff (Russell) before in his life, our “everyman” knows he must do everything in his power to track his wife down himself.

An amazingly compact, efficient, and rivetingly effective thriller, from the moment that Katheleen Quinlan disappears, the action in “Breakdown” just goes-goes-goes Beat Generation style, barreling like a semi going down a very steep hill, yet never out-of-control. Clocking in at roughly ninety minutes, Mostow’s film plays like a gritty yet glossy entry into the universally relatable Ordinary Person in Extraordinary Peril subgenre of thriller that we saw so much of in the 1970s in everything from “Duel” to “Deliverance.”

Keeping some of its roots as a project developed based upon the work of Stephen King (like his short story “Trucks,” which the film’s producers had already made into “Maximum Overdrive” years earlier), after King backed out and wouldn’t lend his name to the picture, Mostow went back to his original Hitchcockian inspiration to deliver a frighteningly intense gaslit neo-action-noir.

Missing the humor of “The Lady Vanishes,” or the investigation of faux female hysteria evident in both that picture as well as “Gaslight,” “So Long at the Fair,” and others, “Breakdown” is a no-holds-barred, pared-down, male-centric, intentionally “redneck” infused work of southwestern nastiness. And it's this last characteristic that Mostow emphasizes by making Jeff and Amy Taylor from Boston, as the couple moves west to San Diego in search of a better life. Like the settlers who ventured that direction in old western films or on the Oregon Trail in real life, in "Breakdown," Walsh and others make it clear that as outsiders, if they can't "hang," then they don't belong.

At its core, a tale of the women in this country (or really any country) who are here one minute but seemingly dissolve just like molecules and float away into the wind the next, “Breakdown” serves this up to us on a platter of oil, grease, and dirt gleaned from lonely back roads of America, until, filtered in futile rage, it becomes a vengeful Man on a Mission movie. Bolstered and made palatable by one of the most likable movie stars of his time, although Russell’s Jeff Taylor is a far cry from his iconic Snake Plissken in John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York” (or “Escape from L.A.,” which he made just before this), my personal favorite era and mode in the career of Kurt Russell is this one.

Catching up with him at a time where he was frequently cast as an everyman who suddenly finds himself in the middle of a ‘90s action movie with (likely) questionable politics, as epitomized by films like “Unlawful Entry,” “Executive Decision,” and “Breakdown,” back then, it was great to finally see him play something closer to the man his colleagues say he is in real life. And while all three of those films still pack a punch and pull you right in to get similarly bruised, battered, and blood pressure-shot alongside our lead, it’s “Breakdown” that feels perhaps the most timeless and/or maybe the least ‘90s of this particular ‘90s trio.

For as much as it was a film of its time (and it was indeed a movie that opened at number one at the box office), it still feels vintage in the best way. Not just a picture with more in common with those made a decade or two before it like “Duel" or “Road Games," "Breakdown" also deftly deals in questions of paranoia that fueled so many of the classic gaslight noirs, including the Hitchcockian comedy of manners and errors, “The Lady Vanishes.”

Though largely overlooked in conversations about the filmmaker’s most famous works, it’s safe to call “Vanishes” the most significant transportation-based mystery of its time, after Agatha Christie’s novel “Murder on the Orient Express,” which was written four years before Hitch’s film but adapted for the screen forty years later in 1974, right around the time “Duel” and “Deliverance” trafficked in similar thematic terrain.

Although some may say that everything old is new again (and what else is new), there’s this question of taking a wrong turn, possibly disappearing, and/or being thrust into a situation like this - especially when you’re vulnerable on the road, on the train, on the river, or on vacation - that makes these films so urgently gripping. At the same time, admittedly, some of the films cited have a convoluted solution, and sure enough, as “Breakdown” devolves into a work of near horror closer to its conclusion, it sacrifices some of its relatable ingenuity and mystery in order to give us a true showdown of bravura and vengeance and pushes our suspension of disbelief close to its breaking point.

But it’s still such a well-written, crackerjack, nerve-jangling, heart in your throat affair that’s anchored by the casting of “every day” Kurt that we just can’t help holding on and staying with it (and him) until the very end. Produced by Dino and Martha De Laurentiis, and filled with practical effects, real trucks, and Russell doing his own stunts - including driving a Jeep downhill and going with it right into the water - “Breakdown” is a throwback to the days before CGI dominated everything.

Famously, however, in his largely glowing review of the film from 1997, “Chicago Sun-Times” critic Roger Ebert pointed out that he felt that the ending of “Breakdown” swung too far into old testament “eye for an eye” territory than he felt it needed to as we see our leads battle it out. Yet although I can understand that perspective, at the same time, the movie’s western desert setting has the mythos of that genre built right into the landscape so I think that, although it’s undeniably an over-the-top over-kill, it still gives viewers a very meta form of catharsis in at least seeing a female character assert herself in this environment where they’re typically forgotten and/or used as cattle or currency.

(Note: I’ll be intentionally vague here to avoid concrete spoilers but you’ve been warned.)

To this end, one fascinating new revelation that's revealed in one of the terrific bonus features available in Paramount’s spotless new Blu-ray is that this final bit of comeuppance was given to this cast member by Kurt Russell in an act of solidarity. Tired of seeing women only play the victim, after she requested one victorious moment where she could turn the tables on her captor without being “forced” to do so in an act of self-defense, Russell stepped in and offered her the film’s final bit of frontier justice that he was supposed to dole out himself. And while, of course, it’s ridiculous as noted, seen in this light and not only in an era of Me Too but also after decades of movies of this type where women are usually gaslit, abducted, or killed, I must say I’m all for it.

An unrelenting thriller where the minutes fly by as quickly as Quinlan’s lady vanishes from Russell’s eye line, while as a film geek, it’s fun to dissect which legendary films of the past might’ve inspired Mostow’s “Breakdown,” on a Saturday night, it’s far more entertaining to first buckle into that newly vacant shotgun seat of that Jeep Grand Cherokee with Russell at the wheel and just go along for the ride.

Movie Review: I'm Your Man (2021)

2021-09-21T14:35:00.003-07:00

Now Available

A tall, kind, supportive, handsome, dark-haired man with a British accent who looks at the woman that he's with with puppy dog levels of adoration, if Tom (Dan Stevens) seems like the perfect man, that's because he is…for the most part. Unfortunately, however, what he isn't is a man.

A humanoid robot designed to be one hundred percent compatible with Alma (Maren Eggert), a Pergamon Museum academic who has agreed to evaluate Tom for a three week period in order to fund and further her own research into ancient cuneiform writing, although their prospective relationship seems like a joke to the deeply uncomfortable Alma, Tom takes his romantic mission deadly seriously.

From being startled when she gives him his own bedroom instead of sharing a bed with him to being hurt when she's too busy to indulge in a romantic brunch he whipped up for her the next morning, just like we all learn and adapt to our own partners over the years, Tom does as well. Not allowed to tell others that he's a robot, an embarrassed Alma deposits him in a cafe by her work the next day and, just like the metaphorical puppy dog he resembles following his “master” around, Tom happily stands outside in the rain once the business closes and waits for her to return.

Humanistic and true, despite the fact that it deals in the artificiality of technology, acclaimed actress turned director Maria Schrader's German film “I'm Your Man” – which she co-wrote with Jan Schomburg, based on a short story by Emma Braslavsky – begins as a gentle comedy of manners and errors. But, aided immensely by the chemistry of our leads and the fact that the delightful Stevens never once slips and plays Tom with a wink instead of absolutely straight, the film soon modulates into a melancholic, timely meditation of the importance of human affection and connection and a study of loneliness in contemporary society.

Embodied extraordinarily well by Eggert (in a difficult balance of vulnerability and strength throughout), the more we learn about Alma, including the source of her pain and the reason why she's put up so many walls, the more we understand how hard it is for her to knock them down for someone – anyone – let alone a robot programmed to be her dream beau.

Choosing, as we all do, which people we're willing to let into our weird little worlds, Alma is a woman who's been burned in the past. Furthermore, the screenwriters' decision for the film's tech firm to bring to life a mate who, through no fault of “his” own, calls up the mental picture of someone Alma loved when her life was much simpler and everything was in front of her both professionally and personally, makes “I'm Your Man” resonate on a deeper, more universal level than one would assume going in.

While on the lighter side of philosophical, it nonetheless raises valid questions about how relationships build or disintegrate over time as our needs change and how we all walk around with different levels of trauma. Yet Schrader's movie has far less in common with other films about romantic robot surrogates like Steven Spielberg's Kubrickian “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” than it does with either mythology or George Bernard Shaw's “Pygmalion” (and its musical counterpart “My Fair Lady”).

A critical hit overseas, especially in its native Germany where lead actress Maren Eggert won the first-ever gender-neutral Silver Bear acting prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, although the ending of “I'm Your Man” comes off as abrupt and a bit tonally dissonant with respect to the rest of the film's harmony, it's still a wholly impressive foreign import overall.

Befitting of the phrase “and now for something completely different,” while the tendency would be in America to play the whole thing for laughs, there's something far more refreshing and earnest about Schrader's approach. Following Tom's lead, as you view “I'm Your Man,” it gazes right back at you with interest, hoping that – if you look closely enough – you'll catch not only a flicker of recognition but your whole self reflected back at you as you watch.

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Film Movement Movie Review: Final Set (2021)

2021-08-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

Opens Virtually & in NYC on 8/27

“If you'd won quicker, you'd suffer less.”

Watching her son, thirty-something professional tennis player Thomas Edison (Alex Lutz) apply an ice pack to his knee during dinner, Judith (Kristin Scott Thomas) can't help but ask, “why lose the first set?”

Having helped propel Thomas to early greatness as a young prodigy, Judith struggles to remove her coaching hat to support her son the way that a typical mother would. Coming from a place of not only criticism but also love – because to care for Thomas and the knee he'd had operated on multiple times in the past is to question why he still feels the need to try to compete against the top players of the world at his age – to say that their relationship is complicated would be an understatement. But understating it is precisely what makes their dynamic and everything else in French writer-director Quentin Reynaud's “Final Set” so real and compelling.

Minimal and precise, the dialogue between not only Thomas and Judith but also Thomas and his loving, supportive, but equally conflicted wife Eve (Ana Girardot) is spare throughout the work which boasts a quasi-documentary feel. Yet, delivered by this exceptional group of actors who can say so much with a look or tone, we feel the weight of one’s meaning even though the English subtitled lines are spoken in French. In fact, generating a great deal of conflict and depth from these micro-moments, it's a film where those inquisitive looks over dinner or cautious actions – even the way one character packs or carries a tennis bag – speak louder than words.

From the Australian Open in January to the ATP finals for the highest-ranked male players in November, tennis, more than most sports, is essentially played for eleven months out of the year. Unfortunately, with a ranking of 245, which is a far cry from the great hope he was supposed to be twenty years earlier when he choked during a grand slam, Thomas' respectable but still low stats keep him out of most major tournaments, which cater only to the top players in the sport.

And while he would prefer to enter every competition he can, his wife – a former player herself who now handles the behind-the-scenes business decisions – has to gently remind her husband that when you subtract the travel, food, and lodging costs, far too often, the actual winnings from some of these events don't justify the expense. Supplementing the income he barely receives from matches he's allowed to enter by working as a children's coach at his mother's tennis club, while everyone around him is waiting for him to hang up his racket or join the over thirty-five tour, Thomas decides to make one last stand at Roland Garros.

Otherwise known as the French Open, at Roland Garros, tennis is played on courts of famous red clay where the surface of the terrain not only sticks to a player's shoes, socks, legs, clothes, and arms if they take a nasty fall, but as legends like Andre Agassi and Roger Federer are first to admit, it's also sheer hell on the knees. And if it's hard on those joints at any age, you know it's destined to be agony for Thomas whose prominent knee surgery scars, arthritis, ligament lesions, and osteoarthritis are shown and discussed within the first five minutes of Reynaud's movie.

Nonetheless, knowing he doesn't have a lot of time left but not quite ready to follow in his wife's footsteps and train for another career because – despite being a husband and father – a life outside of tennis isn't something he's ever considered, Thomas decides to make a run at the Open by playing several brutal rounds as a qualifier. Facing other players not lucky enough to get in via wild card or ranked highly enough, even though his wife Eve tells him to “have fun” before he leaves for a match, we know that for the serious Thomas, fun doesn't really enter the equation. No, in this quixotic, underdog run, it's just about determination, desperation, and the work.

Drawing a parallel throughout to a cocky, young, but exceptionally gifted seventeen-year-old phenom on the rise (played by real pro player Jürgen Briand), who even Eve admits reminds her of her husband, obviously, you know that eventually, the two men will have to square off at some point to achieve the dramatic potential of Thomas “playing himself” in “Final Set.” Still, it's in the authenticity of the film's battle to that battle – and particularly the amount of regret, guilt, excitement, frustration, and pain of both the past and present that flood our main ensemble from start to finish – that makes this film feel like something beyond just your typical inspirational sports drama.

Furthermore, the time that Reynaud takes off the court and how much trust he puts into this excellent trio of actors (with once again, Scott Thomas doing some of her best work both later in life and in French) makes his bold decision to spend the film's final twenty-five minutes on the court so incredibly effective. Set during a showdown between the two pros at different points in their life, Reynaud goes right for the greatest hits of dramatic tennis.

Zeroing in on a five-set grand slam match between a David and a Goliath, which features a never-ending deuce, racket smashes, cramps, long rallies, and more, the film achieves something so thrillingly intense that for a long time, I actually forgot for a while that I was watching a movie instead of championship play. More than that, as someone whose TV is often left on The Tennis Channel, it was only after the movie ended when I was reading the film's production notes that I realized that the final match went on for nearly the length of a traditional “act” of a Syd Field screenplay.

Yet, similar to the way that I love a good football movie even if it isn't a sport I actually watch, this isn't to say that one needs to be an avid tennis fan or even know much about the sport to enjoy “Final Set.” Filmed at Roland Garros and using that tried and true blueprint of “Rocky,” which similarly spends a good chunk of the film's last half right in that boxing ring as we watch events unfold in what I'd call “hyper-real time,” Reynaud's film is wildly ambitious in its scope. Refreshingly, though, it's as invested in the human story as it is in its tennis, which comes through in the film's fully earned last shot. A superbly executed ensemble effort that plays out against a backdrop that's the stuff of modern myth-making, as we watch Alex Lutz's Thomas fight against time and his own body's wear-and-tear, we're right there with him, eager to battle it out to the very end.

Movie Review: Raging Fire (2021)

2021-08-19T13:38:00.002-07:00

Now Available

One of my all-time favorite movie reactions is from Denzel Washington who was interviewed on a red carpet after he saw Brian De Palma's “Mission Impossible” in 1996. Recounting the film's many cloak-and-dagger reveals where people switch sides often while in pursuit of the all-important NOC List, Washington leveled with the reporter, joking, “I said to my wife, 'am I stupid or was that hard to understand?'”

I bring this up because just this week, I had a similar reaction to "Raging Fire," the final film of the late great director Benny Chan. After it began, for at least a good twenty minutes, I was in a constant state of confusion. It's not a great feeling. Nobody wants to admit that they have no idea if they're watching a flashback, a jump forward, or if a character who seems like a villain actually is, and in this case, I think my uncertainty was exacerbated by the fact that at least in the screener of the film I was playing, the subtitles were far too small and flew by at the speed of a John Woo bullet ballet. Unsure if this reaction was my issue alone, before I could even pause "Fire" to ask an avid foreign film buff I was watching with if they understood what was going on, they turned to me and said they were finding it almost impossible to keep up.

Until it eventually all came together in a long-overdue burst of exposition, I simply fell back on my love of Hong Kong action movies, which frequently revolve around the duality of a cop and a robber, and how the two characters really are two sides of the exact same coin, “Infernal Affairs,” “City on Fire,” or “Hard Boiled” style. And luckily, that really helped me out in "Raging Fire," which star Donnie Yen readily admits does go right for that old beloved trope of cops and robbers that film fans have cherished since the days of the western in the west and/or samurai tales in the east.

In Chan's movie, Yen stars as an obsessive, dedicated police officer who finds himself pursuing his one-time protege on the force, now turned villain played by Nicholas Tse. Feeling like he was hung out to dry just for - in his eyes - following orders, after spending time in prison, Tse reemerges hell-bent on revenge. I'm giving you the succinct version of the set-up here because, as merely a fan of all involved, I went in completely blind and had trouble sorting it out.

Yet while the film's first act is missing a much-needed sense of flow, which is a recurring problem in Hong Kong movies that often begin with a concept, which only gradually evolves into a script involving these favorite character archetypes, thankfully Benny Chan knows how to direct action. And with his final work, “Raging Fire,” he is there to distract us from the small subtitles and confounding goings-on.

Only in a Chan film will you have the determined officer played by Donnie Yen tell his squad to go home after a twenty-hour workday and after they leave, he decides to go to an inner-city lair where he fights roughly twenty-five guys at once. It's an insanely wise decision for "Fire," because, I mean, Yen is “Ip Man” after all! Ultra stylish in that glossy Hong Kong way where even the ultraviolence is beautiful, in “Raging Fire,” our two incredibly photogenic leads duke it out in the rain (among other places) and Edmond Fung's cinematography is so vivid and urgent, you can't help but want to reach your hand out to see if you can feel a raindrop hit your skin as well.

Drawn to the movie because, as Tse said, he knew it would be a rare chance to do real old-school, contemporary Hong Kong action that nobody seems to be making anymore due to the danger and expense, “Fire” is filled with rapid shoot-outs, explosions galore, and hand-to-hand combat, including a final fight sequence so intricate that it took nearly two weeks to film. Featuring incredible wirework and death-defying stunts that glide by like Gene Kelly tap-dancing in an MGM musical, in one of the film's most memorable moments, we see a motorcycle vs. car duel play out in traffic with blows landed and thrown through an open window and sunroof that must be seen to be believed.

Proof that sometimes plot (or coherence) is overrated, although, even when you figure it all out, the film's storyline is forgettably threadbare, for action lovers, “Raging Fire,” is a full “turn your brain off and just enjoy the ride” throwback to the glory days of Hong Kong cinema in the late '80s and '90s when films like Benny Chan's “A Moment of Romance” reigned supreme.

While not as masterful as the Hong Kong classic "Romance," it's still a spectacle of human achievement executed by a film crew who will literally risk being executed to dazzle you. Made with true affection by Yen, Tse, and company for the late director they loved so much, even if the first half-hour of rapid-fire subtitles and scene jumps in “Raging Fire” made me feel – in Washington's words – “stupid,” the entertainment value of Chan's film isn't hard to understand.

Blu-ray Review: Last Train From Gun Hill (1959)

2021-07-05T14:26:00.005-07:00

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Originally purchased in 1954 by producer Hal Wallis as a potential western vehicle for either Burt Lancaster or Charlton Heston, although those efforts stalled, five years later, Wallis was able to see his dream of a big-screen adaptation of TV writer Les Crutchfield's thrilling story "Showdown" come true.

Sharing production duties with star Kirk Douglas's own company Bryna Productions, Hal Wallis reunited with the cast and crew of his 1957 Paramount hit "Gunfight at the OK Corral" two years later for the briskly paced, startlingly gritty, taut, high profile VistaVision release "Last Train From Gun Hill."

Directed by John Sturges and shot by gifted versatile cinematographer Charles Lang the exact same year he lensed "Some Like It Hot," he fills "Gun Hill" with a mixture of dark noir shadows and an at times luridly bright, flammable color scheme of reds, oranges, and yellows to almost expressionistic effect. This visual motif serves as an ingeniously bold yet still subtle depiction of the fiery aggression of its core cast of characters and helps the emotional core of the film remain ever-present from start to finish.

After U.S. Marshall Matt Morgan's Native American wife is raped and murdered by two young sadistic cowboys in front of their young son, the lawman (played by Kirk Douglas) vows to do whatever it takes to bring the killers to justice. Discovering their connection to his old friend Craig Belden (Anthony Quinn), thanks to a distinctive saddle on one's horse that his son was able to use to escape the villains, Matt journeys to Craig's Gun Hill with his gun and badge, even though he's advised that those things won't be welcome there.

"You work for Craig Belden?" Matt asks when he gets off the train, before, in a half of a line that fans of 1993's "Tombstone" know very well, he lowers the boom. "You tell him I'm coming."

However, it seems that Quinn's Craig Belden is in for a rude wake-up call as well. Having been told by his son Rick (Earl Holliman) that his horse and saddle had been stolen by thieves and that the garish scratch Rick's suddenly sporting on his face came from a lusty encounter, once Matt arrives and asks his old friend for help, Craig realizes that his son and friend are the ones responsible for the heinous crime.

And when Matt comes to the same conclusion as Craig, the shocked but proud man implores Matt not to arrest Rick, warning him that he not only runs the entire town but also the police. Informing Craig that he aims to bring Rick and Lee back to face charges on that night's last train leaving from Gun Hill, Matt embarks upon a lonely search throughout the corrupt town to track them down. And soon enough, he deduces that the only thing the people of Gun Hill value less than the life of a Native American is that of a Native American woman.

Although it's reminiscent of "High Noon" in Matt's one against the world quest, which, like "High Noon" manages to work in a female ally as well in the form of Carolyn James, the tale that "Last Train From Gun Hill" seems to have the most in common with is ultimately "3:10 to Yuma," based on the 1953 Elmore Leonard story.

Made into a film at Columbia Pictures in 1957 from director Delmer Daves (after which it was remade by James Mangold in 2007), fans of "Yuma" will see a lot of similarities between the plight of Matt and Van Heflin's in "Yuma" as well. And this is especially evident when a fair amount of action in "Hill" plays out at a hotel after Matt manages to capture and subdue Rick, despite knowing he's surrounded by gunmen ready to free Craig's son (which we saw in "Yuma" with Heflin and Glenn Ford) before they can board that train.

While "Gun Hill" admittedly places a good deal of its emphasis on action whereas "Yuma" involves far more scenes of mental chess played between the two men, "Hill" is still a psychologically thrilling work as it presents Matt and Craig as two flip-sides of the same coin who've grown further and further apart in their attitudes of right and wrong over the years.

Using the same type of approach he used to balance the moral, internal struggle of his characters with terse, tense, temper driven bursts of prideful masculine violence that he employed so perfectly in 1955's masterful "Bad Day at Black Rock," Sturges, along with his crew, lends a real sense of artistry to the film. Elevating it above its otherwise predictable "B" revenge western feel, the 94-minute movie not only flies right by but also helps foreshadow the career that the director would have in the early '60s, helming "The Magnificent Seven" (with some of this film's collaborators) and “The Great Escape” as well.

Given an impressively vibrant 6K transfer to Blu-ray (plus an HD digital copy) as part of the Paramount Presents series of titles, "Last Train From Gun Hill" might feel like something of a forgotten western from the era. But like Matt stalking through the alternating reds, oranges, yellows, and dark shadows in order to get his men before things ignite, this is one film that's well worth tracking down.

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Movie Review: The Dry (2020)

2021-05-18T14:26:00.003-07:00

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From the desolate, sun-drenched terrain of beige, brown, and yellow as far as the eye can see to the constant threat of bushfire thanks to the dryness of the environment and its unforgiving temperatures, the moody mythos of rural Australia is perfectly suited to western noir storytelling.

Not quite John Ford and not quite John Dahl – to audiences in the American southwest watching director Robert Connolly's new adaptation of Jane Harper's award-winning first novel “The Dry,” the film's overwhelmingly massive landscape seems equal parts foreign and familiar as it spools out before us onscreen.

Easily the most important character in this slow-burn thriller, in the hands of Connolly, his co-scripters Harry Cripps and Samantha Strauss, and his gifted lead actor Eric Bana (who also produced), the setting serves as a terrific allegory for the internal battle playing out in the mind of our main character as well.

As Australian federal police officer Aaron Falk, Bana's conflicted protagonist leaves his residence in Melbourne to return to his rural hometown of Kiewarra for the first time in over twenty years in order to bury his best high school friend Luke (Martin Dingle Wall) who killed his wife and young son in an alleged murder-suicide. Unwilling to believe that their son could do such a thing, after visiting with Luke's parents, Aaron promises them that he'll look into his family's deaths, even though he has no jurisdiction or any real link to the man his former friend had become after all this time.

An intelligent, evocative look at the way that the past and the present can coexist simultaneously, as Aaron investigates the present-day crime alongside a young sergeant (played by Keir O'Donnell), the film reveals more about his complicated history with Luke, including the suspicious death of a beautiful young woman they knew in high school that still haunts Aaron to this day. Feeling like the two cases are inextricably linked (or perhaps just needing them to be in order to find closure), just like the dry tinder of the ground beneath his feet that could catch fire at any moment, Aaron must figure out what is and what is not in his power to control.

A methodical actor who's at his best when playing contemplative characters who keep their cards close to their chest while embarking on external missions that wind up having to do more with what's going on internally than anything else, “The Dry” boasts one of Bana's strongest and most introspective turns in years.

Shot four-and-a-half hours outside of Melbourne in the flat, dry landscape of the Wimmera region of Victoria with its wide-open spaces that convey both mystery and danger and the secrets of a small, deceptively close-knit community beginning to come undone, “The Dry” feels like a western neo-noir descendant of “One False Move” and “Flesh and Bone.” But like an existential mystery made by a post-“Paris, Texas” era Wim Wenders, “The Dry” is much more intrigued by the psychology of its people rather than the traditionally plot-heavy machinations of a '90s thriller. Richly atmospheric and decidedly deliberate, it's the best Australian film of this type since director Ivan Sen released the brilliant sequel to his breakout hit “Mystery Road” in 2016 with “Goldstone.”

Taking time to develop, as we meet the people of Kiewarra, we aren't quite sure who and how many of these citizens and threads might prove to be connected in nefarious ways. One of those films where you find yourself following Bana into a small-town bar, look around and instantly know that every single person onscreen has an unpredictable story to tell, while a few of its supporting characters – including Aaron and Luke's old friend Gretchen (well played by Genevieve O'Reilly) – are a bit shortchanged by the narrative as a whole, it's a truly effective sleeper overall. Preferring to take the long way around in such a way that the film's first hour requires the patience of a prestige TV mystery series, once “The Dry” finds its footing, everything clicks into place.

Building up energy as it continues like a cyclone whipping around dust in the Victorian flatlands, as Aaron works to solve both cases using his heart as well as his head, the film reaches a conclusion as shocking as it is true. Surprisingly stellar in its deployment of red herrings and misdirection, in offering viewers a brainy, unexpected respite from mindless studio ventures, “The Dry” strikes a match against celluloid and brings the heat of summer movie season directly to the screen.

Movie Review: Riders of Justice (2020)

2021-05-13T10:30:00.004-07:00

Now Available

After making a striking first impression in his earliest screen role in Nicolas Winding Refn's gritty and groundbreaking feature filmmaking debut "Pusher" in 1996, actor Mads Mikkelsen became a sensation in his native Denmark. And although Refn's film had more in common with say, Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" than it did with the newly launched naturalism based Dogme '95 film movement from directors Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, Mikkelsen evolved into one of the most internationally recognizable stars from this school of filmmaking, thanks to a vital, early collaboration with writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen.

Following Jensen's 1998 Oscar for Best Short Film, fresh off the heels of having been nominated in the same category the two years prior as well, Mikkelsen's alliance with the filmmaker began with Jensen's feature directorial debut "Flickering Lights" in 2000. But their partnership really reached the height of its power in the films "Open Hearts" and "After the Wedding," which Jensen co-wrote with their director Susanne Bier (and the latter of which garnered Bier her first of two Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film). The global success of those films, along with some which made Mikkelsen the muse of other Dogme vets led directly to his Hollywood crossover and subsequent popularity as a franchise favorite with turns in new Marvel, James Bond, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Indiana Jones properties.

Unwilling to leave his friends, language, and country behind, the loyal chameleon regularly alternates between huge studio tentpoles and the latest films from those he first found success alongside decades earlier. And this is not only true of Vinterberg, for whom he just starred in the Oscar-winning "Another Round," but especially Jensen, who has written and/or directed Mikkelsen in some of his most surprising fare over the years, from the morality tale "Adam's Apples" to the western "The Salvation" (for director Kristian Levring) to the new unorthodox holiday revenge dramedy "Riders of Justice."

Playing a recently deployed soldier who's sent home to care for his teenage daughter after she survives the train explosion that claimed the life of his wife, Mikkelsen's Markus is given an unexpected outlet for his rage when he's visited by two statisticians, including a survivor played by Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who was the last person besides his daughter to see his wife alive. Presenting Markus with evidence indicating that her death might have been part of a coordinated attack to prevent a man from testifying against the head of a notorious street gang, after a colleague in facial recognition manages to narrow down a suspect, these three odd wise men join forces with their new soldier friend.

Having neglected to figure out precisely what they should do once they confront the man, when their first interaction impulsively escalates into murder, the motley crew decides they're not done just yet and soon find themselves in the midst of a war with one of Denmark's deadliest crime syndicates.

But rather than give in to the basest instincts of the revenge genre and turn the film into something resembling "Death Wish," by setting the film around the Christmas holiday and populating it with social misfits just out of step with society, Jensen takes the opportunity to explore the questions of faith, chance, fate, and human connection that have fascinated him throughout his entire career.

While not entirely successful, most likely owing to differences in culture and translation, Jensen's tendency to weave startling bits of humor into the plotline, ranging from a recurring focus on weight regarding the teenage daughter of Markus or the blunt handling of a Ukrainian male sex slave they liberate makes the film hit a few discordant notes here and there. Still, with this talented cast, including men like Mikkelsen and Kaas – who've worked together for decades – once again able to add new layers to these at times tonally uneven yet undeniably complex characters, it works much better than you fear it will early on.

Culminating in a thrillingly photographed violent western-style showdown in the snow where the wounded and outnumbered men must figure out how to get out of this situation alive, Jensen punctuates his final act with a few true surprises as his characters struggle to figure things out amid the chaos.

Though unable to authentically balance its swings from sardonic to brutal to funny to sad without the film feeling the least bit artificial, Mikkelsen and company ensure that although – like their characters – they always remain ready to battle, the real thing that sets "Riders" apart is in the ensemble's journey towards one another and away from revenge. Of course, having proven it again and again over the years, it seems as though that kind of loyalty is more than just a plot point, in the end, it's the Mikkelsen way.

Movie Review: Wrath of Man (2021)

2021-05-06T15:08:00.003-07:00

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With his mischievous wit, jaw-dropping athleticism, and old-fashioned charm seducing us right from the start of his very first movie – writer-director Guy Ritchie's auspicious 1998 feature filmmaking debut "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'' – enigmatic British actor Jason Statham taught viewers to expect the unexpected whenever he hit the screen. But, unable to be pigeonholed as one specific thing in an industry that thrives on packaging people like products to be marketed, sold, and moved with the same felicity as a bottle of salad dressing, Hollywood has never quite figured out what to do with the unique skill-set of Jason Statham.

Equally at home in comedic, dramatic, and action-focused fare, Statham's ease and dexterity in conveying emotion and information both verbally and nonverbally have, in the years following his last film with Ritchie in 2005's "Revolver" made him something of a half Cary Grant, half Jackie Chan, twenty-first-century unicorn film star. Serving up different sides of himself in everything from "The Bank Job" to the "Fast and Furious" franchise to "Spy," while he's consistently done good work, the 2010s found Statham playing a few too many interchangeable smartass badasses as he coasted from one hit-or-miss action movie to the next.

Having left the clever ensemble oriented crime dramedies that first put him on the map behind, as it turns out, Statham's situation is remarkably similar to the one faced by Guy Ritchie who's struggled to put his own stamp on summer studio tentpoles like "King Arthur" and "Aladdin" in recent years. Now, with the two old friends who first hit fame alongside one another a generation ago agreeing to re-team for a smaller and more intimate, but nonetheless compelling character-driven action film, they've both made the bold decision to address their creative habits and strip their work back to its essence in the stealthily efficient '70s style heist revenge movie "Wrath of Man."

Based upon the 2004 French film “Le convoyeur” aka “Cash Truck” from director Nicolas Boukhrief, which Ritchie adapted alongside his frequent screenwriting collaborators Marn Davies and Ivan Atkinson, “Wrath of Man” is a sharp left-hand turn for the British helmer away from the hyper-kinetic brand of filmmaking most synonymous with his name.

Gone here is Ritchie's obsessive kid in a candy store aesthetic of near eye-twitching levels of fast-motion stimuli, which at its best, dazzled viewers and worst, drove us to distraction right along with his penchant for camera trickery. In in its place, he's placed greater emphasis on his man-on-a-mission character-centric storytelling, which makes sense for this tale about a mysterious man (Statham) who walks in off the street and gets a job working for a frequently hijacked L.A. armored car company, only for us to discover that his reasons are far more personal than they are professional.

Taking an unexpectedly understated approach, for the film's first act, I could barely distinguish the U.K. based director of this film from men like Steven Knight or Simon West who'd helmed other vengeance fueled works of this type like “Redemption” and “The Mechanic” for Statham in the late aughts to early '10s. And while initially, it feels more like Ritchie is a director for hire than say, the man that made the newest versions of “Sherlock Holmes” and “The Man From Uncle,” I like how secure he is as a more mature filmmaker to know that the last thing this film needs is a bunch of sudden jump-cuts or shots from the point-of-view of bullets being fired from a machine gun. Ritchie’s strength here is in knowing who, what, and why we’re watching and getting us so lost in the story that when he finally decides to let us behind the curtain, we’re hooked.

Unwilling to mug for the camera or flash that megawatt smile that sometimes makes it impossible to separate a Statham character from the man himself, Ritchie's more restrained technique compliments the quiet power of his leading man very well. Uncovering the real reason why Statham's protagonist joined the armored car company, when the film finally abandons its early over-reliance on male bravado as its employees (played by Holt McCallany and Josh Hartnett) try sizing up the new guy, we begin to see “Wrath of Man” for the bare-bones revenge film that it is.

A terrific director of actors who's known for his ability to attract stellar talent from all corners of the globe, one of the best things about Ritchie's latest work is the trust and patience he places in his cast to reel us in. Developing slowly like a Polaroid that Ritchie's unwilling to shake, once “Wrath” introduces its second group of characters led by Jeffrey Donovan (who's been tacitly doing some of the best work of his career recently elevating even B-movies like “Let Him Go” and “Honest Thief”), we see precisely why everyone said yes to this remake.

Becoming as involved in Donovan's morally complicated plight as we are in Statham's as though they're two flip-sides of the same coin, it's the actors who invest us in watching what (on paper, at least) would otherwise be an admittedly standard heist drama unfold. Featuring a chilling turn by Scott Eastwood (visibly relishing the opportunity to star in the kind of film his father would've certainly gravitated to in the '70s), “Wrath of Man” is a crackerjack B-movie that works so much better than it should because of the A-talent involved on both sides of the screen. And as one of the film's screenwriters, Ritchie understands this well.

Reuniting with his old friend Statham who, in shifting from one genre to the next over the years, lives to astonish, “Wrath” finds the two in the mood to reevaluate just what it is they can and should bring to a film when they're planning a stripped-down heist as opposed to an over-inflated tentpole.

Relatively straightforward both stylistically and narratively, save for a few flourishes because Guy is Guy after all and he loves to turn a straight line into a maze, “Wrath of Man” might not be what most people would think of when they hear the name Guy Ritchie, but this only works to the film’s advantage. Playing against audience expectations Statham-style, while this is one stellar vehicle for the movie star he put on the map, the biggest surprise of all in “Wrath of Man,” is that twenty-three years after “Lock, Stock,” Guy Ritchie is introducing himself to the world once again, saying, “Okay, you've seen that. Now, look what else I can do.”

Movie Review: The Virtuoso (2021)

2021-04-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

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As we watch him execute his target at the beginning of the largely lifeless “The Virtuoso,” Anson Mount's unnamed hitman regales us with tongue-twister levels of alliteration. In his clunky voice-over narration, Mount describes the tricks of his trade. This means that for professional killers hoping for pristine, precise hits, it’s of paramount procedure to follow the protocols of planning and position in order to persevere. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but as Mount punches those alliterative words with purpose – undoubtedly trying to make sense of it all – it's hard not to feel like you're getting hit in the face by the “P” key of an old-fashioned typewriter for how often they're used.

Following up one surgically precise assassination with a rushed hit that goes wrong almost as soon as it starts, writer James C. Wolf's “Virtuoso” screenplay loosens up after that. Abandoning the emphasis on “P,” as though one consequence of the botched job was to cause the pages of Wolf's thesaurus to become unstuck, we watch as our virtuoso killer is lured away from his rustic, self-imposed isolation in the woods by his trusted employer (a game yet wasted Anthony Hopkins).

Making a horrifying meal out of a matter-of-fact monologue about the time his character was ordered to slaughter men, women, and children in Vietnam, Hopkins proves why he and he alone is the film's true virtuoso. Dropping in like a veritable hired gun for a few scenes before he presumably goes off to work on grander fare like “The Father,” Hopkins is easily the best thing in this self-important mess of a B-movie.

Sending Mount on a cryptic assignment where the quarry is given a code name like he's The Riddler in a Batman movie, our virtuoso ventures to a country town in the middle of nowhere. After a chance run-in with a few suspicious strangers at a gas station, he suddenly finds himself in a diner full of shady figures he's supposed to covertly assess as potential targets. Forgetting his lofty voice-over protocols of planning and precision, illogically, Mount just starts running the code name past people, quickly becoming the most conspicuous man in town.

One of those films with classic or neo-noir ambitions that at times you think might've been attempting to strive for “Key Largo” or even “Identity” like atmosphere and tension with its ensemble cast of characters in a small setting, the most surprising thing about director Nick Stagliano's muted, muddied “Virtuoso” is just how unsurprising it is from start to finish.

Almost as soon as one particular stranger is introduced, genre conventions tell you precisely where this thing is headed and like its hitman (well, in the first hit anyway) it doesn't deviate from its plan. Saddled with wooden dialogue and zero chemistry between the leads, “The Virtuoso” spends the rest of its 110 minute running time trying to make you believe another twist is coming. Sadly, it doesn't take long to realize that, despite the film's allusions to the contrary, Mount's visibly bored main character is many things but a virtuoso is not one of them.

Hoping to stack the deck, the movie is loaded with terrific character actors like the aforementioned Hopkins as well as Abbie Cornish, Eddie Marsan, and David Morse, some of whom appear for only the briefest of scenes to hopefully follow Hopkins' lead to show up, do the work, collect the paycheck, and get the hell out.

Still, whether it's with its talented cast, the film's few bursts of violence, or its near-bookended, gratuitously clinical depictions of nudity/sex which only call attention to themselves, no matter how hard “The Virtuoso” tries to command our attention, it's impossible to camouflage just how dull it is overall.

Bowing into theaters in some markets (including Phoenix) only five days after Hopkins garnered his second Oscar and four days before it bows onto DVD and Blu-ray, since curiosity over Hopkins' involvement is sure to drive some people to see this on the big screen, the timing of the film couldn't be better. Reinforcing Mount's words about the importance of his many professional “P”'s, what “The Virtuoso” lacks in pristine precision, its marketing team more than makes up for with their plan to persevere with a little help from gold.

Movie Review: The Courier (2020)

2021-03-17T15:51:00.014-07:00

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Feature films are not documentaries. Regardless of what a title card reads at the beginning of a biopic, period picture, or other work “based upon” or “inspired by true events,” by now most film lovers know that you shouldn't consider a movie historical Cliff's Notes. If you want to know what really happened, it’s best to pick up a nonfiction book instead.

Discovering this, it becomes harder to judge fictionalized “true stories” for when and where they decide to adhere to or deviate from the real turns of events or players involved. A valuable rule of thumb for me personally, but as the internet likes to say “your mileage may vary,” is that even when minor details are changed or new subplots are added for dramatic effect, it still has to feel true within the cinematic world where the story exists. Namely, any fictional changes made in a movie should not pull you out of the overall narrative.

Unfortunately, this is one of the major ways where director Dominic Cooke's otherwise superbly acted faux true-life Cold War drama “The Courier” goes so wrong. A film about a British businessman (Benedict Cumberbatch) who's recruited to transport top-secret documents from a Soviet officer asset (Merab Ninidze) back to his MI6 and CIA handlers in the UK during the Cuban Missile Crisis, “The Courier” is utterly fascinating on the page but only mildly successful on the screen.

Anachronistic at best, the filmmaker’s decision to cast the unquestionably gifted Rachel Brosnahan as a young female American CIA agent working with MI6 to run foreign operatives in Russia in an era where the people doing so were men feels primarily like tokenism. And indeed, in the film's production notes, even “The Courier” screenwriter Tom O'Connor admits that “casting another male wasn't the most compelling version of the story to tell these days."

Reading this acknowledgment is annoying to me for several reasons. As women, we have our own worthwhile stories to bring to the screen and don’t need “The Courier” to shortchange the roles we played in the given period just because we weren't running international spy-rings.

Yet even if O'Connor and Cooke weren't trying to be overly trendy in the post-Me Too era, which most female filmgoers are quick to see through, Brosnahan's CIA agent in “The Courier” feels so inauthentic that her mere presence – and the talented actress's strong performance – makes her minor character far more interesting than everyone else's. Obviously, this couldn't have been the filmmaker's intention all along or they would’ve centered the film on Brosnahan instead of “The Courier.” As soon as she appears onscreen, she easily overshadows Cumberbatch's rather dry everyday businessman, the woefully underwritten Greville Wynne who is purported to be the protagonist. But when it comes to the film's eponymous courier, in this regard, we quickly deduce that she is far from alone.

A weak main character as written, further research reveals that Greville Wynne is a relatively blank slate. Following the events of the film, it seems that not only did MI6 not thank the businessman or disclose much about his international pursuits but the real Wynne wrote two different memoirs that have been largely debunked, likely owing to a mental decline following his harrowing days as a citizen spy.

Although he’s undoubtedly an unexpected British hero worthy of greater study, Wynne is done a disservice in “The Courier,” once we’re introduced to Cumberbatch's enigmatic counterpart in the form of Merab Ninidze's Russian officer Oleg Penkovsky early on. Immediately engaged in the plight of this man putting his family, career, and life on the line for his principles on his own accord, not only does Penkovsky steal focus from our British courier throughout, it becomes painfully clear that he would've made a much more gripping main character overall. Of course, the stakes are similar for Wynne but being that Penkovsky is mostly in Russia makes his dual role vastly more terrifying.

Imbued with an intentionally dull visual palette, which has a lethargic effect on the film as a whole, despite Cumberbatch's immense range as an actor, whenever “The Courier” follows Ninidze's Penkovsky instead of Wynne, Cooke's work roars back to life. Sadly, however, these moments are as short-lived as they are few and far between.

An altogether underwhelming, workmanlike endeavor, the film marks a disappointing sophomore effort for the director of the impressive '17 sleeper “On Chesil Beach.” Helmed by a man with an extensive background working with actors in the theater, “The Courier” is augmented by the strength of Cooke's ensemble cast, including Jessie Buckley as Wynne's stylish wife who brings a bit of vivacity to the film’s visually dour proceedings.

While on the one hand, it's perhaps worth watching for viewers who are curious about Cold War foreign policy and international relations, on the other, what we have here doesn’t really work as a film. Despite being content as ever to look the other way for the sake of artistic license, the faux factual "Courier" just doesn't entertain us enough to warrant being trendy, UK-centric, and safe rather than unapologetic, international, and real.

A David Morse Reappraisal: Down in the Valley (2005)

2021-02-09T16:44:00.004-07:00

Introduction:

For my latest DVD Netflix actor's spotlight article, I chose five outstanding performances by character actor David Morse. One of the films I analyzed for the piece was this 2005 sleeper but unfortunately, the independent film studio went bust and the DVD is no longer in production or available to rent from Netflix. However, as of this post, "Down in the Valley" is available to stream from a variety of services (check the site/app Just Watch for current details) so I wanted to share this reevaluation of the film here for you today.

"Down in the Valley"

Writer-director David Jacobson's “Down in the Valley” is as eerily dark yet disarmingly gentle as the potentially dangerous modern-day drifter cowboy Harlan Fairfax Curruthers that Edward Norton plays in the flawed yet fascinating film. A psychologically compelling character-driven contemporary western that plays on the genre archetypes of good and evil, the film focuses on the aimless wanderings of two kids coming-of-age in the San Fernando Valley.

As a restless teenager on the cusp of womanhood, Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) spends most of her days with friends or being followed around by her equally bored brother Lonnie (Rory Culkin). A maternal figure standing in for their mother who's out of the picture, in the way that Lonnie gravitates to Tobe, we begin to realize that – although Jacobson barely fills in the details for most of these characters – Wood's Tobe is a girl who has grown up much too quickly.

And just like we see in Norton both darkness and light, casting the precocious Wood (who'd first made a splash playing characters thrust into adulthood early), ensures that Jacobson brilliantly uses people as iconography in “Down in the Valley.”

Ogled by Norton's handsome, much older Harlan as he fills her friend's car with gas, Tobe boldly eyes the stranger back and impulsively invites him to accompany them to the beach. Quitting his job on the spot, he jumps feet first into the ocean and headfirst into a relationship with Tobe.

Guileless and relatively innocent (at least initially), although it's Harlan who has several years on his new girlfriend, after their first afternoon together quickly escalates into sex, it's surprisingly Harlan who wants to pump the brakes a bit and court her '50s style. Asking her younger brother if it's okay that he dates Tobe, in that moment we sense the “aw, shucks” Jimmy Stewart style nervousness that attracted Tobe to Harlan in the first place. Unfortunately for the kids, however, it takes a man closer to Harlan's age to see right through it.

An overprotective stepfather to the two children who once again (with his natural “cop's face”) is cast as a man of the law, when Morse's Wade comes home and sees his stepdaughter wearing a dress that the man she's about to leave home with bought her, alarm bells start to go off in his head. Sizing him up but soon backing down, he lets the two go out, which indicates to us that Tobe must be of age (or else he's just that trusting). Things quickly change, however, first when she begins staying out all hours and again when she gets arrested for stealing a horse after former ranch hand Harlan lets himself onto another man's property to “borrow” a white horse and bring Tobe for a joy ride.

In medieval romantic literature and movie westerns, the chivalrous heroes of the genres are the ones on white horses donning white hats. But even before Jacobson lets us see how white-hatted Harlan spends his days playacting gunfights (with real guns) when Tobe's not around, we start understanding why Wade instinctively knew that when it comes to this cowboy, something is definitely off. Pulled into the melee after the horse's owner (Bruce Dern) calls the cops and tells them that despite Harlan's insistence to the contrary, he's never seen him before in his life, Wade lays down the law that she needs to stop seeing this strange man.

Soon a standoff develops between the two in the meandering third act when Morse – donning a black hat, clothes, and riding a dark horse as well – forms a posse with others to locate and arrest Harlan for a shocking crime. And the film's genre symbolism truly comes full circle when they wander onto a western movie set.

Refusing to give us any answers about the drifter's background or mental state as the character of Harlan takes on some De Niro in “Taxi Driver” like properties when he aspires to “rescue” the kids from their domineering stepfather, the film finds its one true moral center in the complex heart of Wade. A cautionary tale about the dangers of fantasy, which – despite offering a sense of escape – can be taken much too far, Morse's Wade is the prickly voice of reason when the kids are charmed and seduced by Harlan.

Knowing he's too strict with Tobe and frighteningly pushes her away, there's a sense of heartbreak and unease in Wade's behavior throughout the movie. We sense this both when he tells Lonnie not to sleep in his sister's room so much because he wants to toughen the sheltered boy up and also when he struggles to discipline a young woman at her most emotionally and hormonally confusing time. He's ill-equipped for his role as their guardian or single father and he knows it.

Raising questions about masculinity, which admittedly need additional fleshing out to give Morse more to work with and the audience a better sense of their home life, Jacobson's script weaves in a few key lines of dialogue about Wade that are uttered by the other characters. Wanting to impress and bond with his new friend and sudden role model Harlan, Lonnie describes Wade's background in the service as a war veteran. Showing Harlan Wade's collection of vintage guns that he won't let Lonnie touch until he's at least sixteen, Wade's concern over their deadly intent – even when he draws down on Harlan midway into the movie to scare him off – admirably contradicts the casual, frightening way that Norton's character plays with weapons like they're mere extensions of his hand.

Like his work in “Dancer in the Dark,” Morse's role in “Down in the Valley” is a relatively small one compared to co-stars Edward Norton and Evan Rachel Wood (whose portrayal of a young woman under the spell of a dangerous older man at a time that she actually was makes it quite harrowing). Still, via Morse, Wade's new stateside war between wanting to protect his stepchildren from potential harm but not drive them away in the process becomes one of the film's most underdeveloped yet subtly moving plotlines. So caught up in Tobe's relationship was I the first two times I saw the film, this reading of Wade only came to me recently in a rewatch. Intriguingly, although he has a fraction of the screen time, Morse's Wade is the one you'll find yourself contemplating much more after it ends, even though he's far less mysterious than Harlan.

And while the film's insistence to put a bow on the ending as two characters reflect on Norton's troubled cowboy takes something away from “Down in the Valley”'s overall ambiguity, it's a curious film that's elevated by its talented quartet of stars. Likewise, it's one where the innate goodness of Norton and Morse's screen personas in other movies make their work here even richer and more subversive than it is on the page.

Read About 4 More David Morse Films & Performances on DVD Netflix here.

The 30 Best Films of 2020

2021-01-06T17:06:00.007-07:00

The 30 Best Films of 2020

by Jen Johans

An Introduction

For me, it is a truth universally acknowledged that while I love reading lists, I hate making them. Coming up with a quick and dirty Top 5 in the company of friends can be a fun conversational tool to stir debate among film geeks but the prospect of actually sitting down to make a definitive ranking of titles is about as appealing as deep cleaning my refrigerator.

No two lists are alike, just like no two “three-star” movies are alike. I'd much rather champion or critique films in longer pieces throughout the year to inspire greater thought than rely on the quick stars I slap on a film on my Letterboxd account for record-keeping.

It all boils down to taste and criteria, both of which differ wildly from one person to the next. Should you choose your favorite films or the ones you think of when you hear the word best? When asked to explain the difference between the two, the example I always give is Martin Scorsese, whose “Raging Bull” I consider to be his greatest masterpiece yet “Goodfellas” is the picture of his that I watch the most. But when it comes to best, is the technical side of filmmaking more important than the theme of a movie if its cinematography and editing aren't quite where they should be to match the film's script and performances? When should you let the shortcomings of a film slide and when should you more harshly judge another one?

As I began to look at the rather unscientific list I made in 2020 of my favorite new films, I thought about what I looked for in end-of-the-year lists back when I was just a casual fan signing onto “The New York Times” or Roger Ebert's site each December. I realized that while I knew that the more times I came across titles like “Yi Yi” or “In the Mood for Love” on the web, they moved higher up on my list of films to seek out, the thing I loved even more than anything was discovering something new that represented an individual critic's personality in a stance that broke away from the pack.

Some films are, of course, objectively great, and that is the first criteria I used when compiling my list. Starting with the query to list the films that I consider the best of the year, I went with that “Raging Bull” vs. “Goodfellas” dynamic in listing unequivocally excellent films first but once those were out of the way, I started to play. I moved them to various locations in the rankings, by considering other questions as well.

Namely, which films spoke to me the most on a personal level as a 39-year-old disabled woman with my particular worldview and set of experiences? Which ones perhaps meant more to me in 2020 than they would've just one year earlier? If I'd never seen any of the films from 2020, which ones would I want a friend to tell me to see first?

I meant to make a Top 20 of '20 list but my first draft went well past 50 films so I arrived at 30 as a means of compromise. The last movie that I saw in a theater was nearly a year ago and while I miss that communal experience, even without the theater, some truly amazing films were released last year. There are a handful of titles on this list that I watched more than once, including the top film, which I loved so much that I watched it twice in one week. Similarly, there are others you will see here that I found so hard-hitting that I know it will be a long time before I'm able to revisit them. I'm limited to the works that I have access to and/or have seen so far so this list might be right for today but it will inevitably shift with time and greater access to more movies. And as my whims change, something I currently have in my Top 5 or 10 might drop to my Top 20, and vice versa, and others might fall off this list completely.

While working on this project, I quickly realized that I shouldn't write about each film on this list individually for two reasons: the first being that I'm so passionate about these movies that it would be several thousand words long, and the second is that I want you to have that same sense of discovery that I had when I finally sat down to watch, say, 2002's “City of God” for the first time.

My advice to you is don't read too much about these films ahead of time before you push play. My friend, the veteran critic, and screenwriter Drew McWeeny argued on my podcast Watch With Jen that reading film criticism should be saved until after you've watched a movie and I wholeheartedly agree with him. I love and respect film writing and do my best not to spoil any plot points in my pieces but I know that as a consumer in my own right, I do the same thing as Drew. I save the reviews I want to read until after I've seen the movie and have sat with it for a while.

It's incredibly valuable to bring other points of view into my relationship with a movie, whether I agree or disagree with their critique. Honestly, back in the "before times" when press screenings were safe to attend, I opted not to discuss new films very much with fellow critics and chose to instead think about it privately for at least twenty-four hours before I wrote my piece to avoid hyperbole or a rush to judgment. I didn't start out like this of course, because it took some time for me to learn that it's okay not to know what to think about a film right away.

It's said that the legendary critic Gene Siskel would leave the theater rather than see the trailers for upcoming features back when he was writing for “The Chicago Tribune.” While I've never gone that far, I do find myself only watching thirty seconds or so of a YouTube trailer to get the feel of a movie I might agree to review without the disappointment of inevitable spoilers. I love going into a movie knowing little to nothing about it.

Now that we're all home during the pandemic and so much great cinema is available with the push of a button, I encourage you to try something new. Check out films from genres you normally don't embrace and be sure to explore titles from other countries as well. View movie-watching as a new adventure. After all, it's a way to safely travel in the comfort of your own home in 2021. I know that having the ability to go to Greece and swim in the sea with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon is a big part of the reason that I ranked their newest “Trip” film so highly on this list. Yet even though the rest of the movies I included aren't comedic travelogues, they do offer you the chance to escape reality for a while by going back in time or walking in the shoes of someone you'd never expect to meet in your everyday life.

Like seeing a “you are here” sticker on a map, a majority of the best movies of the year opted for a neorealistic approach to storytelling. They aim to drop you directly into the world of their protagonist and lose you for a while. From blue-collar workers going wherever they need to go for work as modern-day nomads to heavy metal drummers or farmers doing the same, most of these films use blisteringly compelling first-person or small ensemble narratives. Concentrating on individuals living their lives on the fringes, we encounter the uncelebrated souls of people just getting by, the un-Coogan and Brydons, if you will.

When writing about what these movies have in common, some critics preferred to zero in on the Me Too aspect apparent in many of 2020's best features and it is definitely there. The popularity of this vital theme, along with the fact that over a dozen of the films in my unedited list of '20 favorites were made by women cannot be understated when evaluating the year's best works. However, I think the real story here is that in a largely (and thankfully) superhero-free year, filmmakers have argued that the real superheroes are the ones who are not “the best” genetic specimens but rather, the ones who get up and do the best they can, regardless of race, gender, or ability.

Navigating wrongs as they're able while also knowing that they still need to put food on the table, in many of these movies, there's a recurring question of who has and what it means to have power. Many of our main characters are backed into a corner and forced to reconcile what it is that they need in this life with what they want. The desire to simplify, to make a connection, and to find meaning even in a world where things aren't fair is felt throughout all of these works, regardless of who the film's subjects are. We see this when we tag along with guests to a 1980s West London dance party, when we watch a Czech artist find a new friend and muse in the Norwegian thief who stole two of her paintings, and in a thinly veiled autobiographical portrait of a filmmaker in Italy trying to come to terms with his own demons and desires.

A combination of “best” and “favorite” movies, including the ones I immediately recommended to others and the ones that kept me up nights, when given the impossible task of making a list, I took a cue from these films and found my own meaning as well. In the end, don't ask me to explain it. Just enjoy the movies because then it’s time for you to decide.

Jen's 30 Best Films of '20

1) “David Byrne’s American Utopia”

2) “Sound of Metal”

3) “Minari”

4) “The Trip to Greece” (full review)

5) “Small Axe: Lovers Rock”

6) “The Nest” (full review)

7) “I’m Your Woman” (full review)

8) “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”

9) “The Assistant” (full review)

10) “A Sun”

11) “Nomadland”

12) “Another Round”

13) “Babyteeth” (full review)

14) “The Painter and the Thief” (full review)

15) “A Good Woman is Hard to Find” (full review)

16) “Black Bear”

17) “One Night in Miami”

18) “Saint Frances”

19) “First Cow”

20) “Herself”

21) “News of the World”

22) “The Burnt Orange Heresy”

23) “Da 5 Bloods”

24) “On the Rocks” (full review) (podcast episode on Sofia Coppola)

25) “Time”

26) "The Vast of Night"

27) “Driveways”

28) “Alone With Her Dreams” (full review)

29) “Tommaso”

30) “Corpus Christi”

Note: I will continue to update this list on Letterboxd as I see more movies and/or revise the order of the titles. You can visit the list in progress here.

Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray Reviews: "Holiday Affair" (1949) and "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940)

2020-12-23T11:46:00.001-07:00

"Holiday Affair" (1949)

Fresh off starring in two 1948 westerns, the romantic "Rachel and the Stranger," and the noirish "Blood on the Moon," perhaps the last thing that Robert Mitchum wanted to do was make a Christmas romcom. But pushed into starring in "Holiday Affair" opposite Janet Leigh, after RKO head honcho Howard Hughes ordered him to make the picture following his arrest and jail sentence for marijuana possession one year earlier, Mitchum turned in a sly, shaggy dog performance so sexy that had Hughes thought it all the way through, he might've changed his mind about casting him altogether.

Fortunately for Mitchum fans, hindsight is 20/20. And although the film was a box office disaster when it was released – which might have had more to do with the confusingly noir-inspired ad campaign than anything else – "Holiday Affair" has since turned into a classic Christmas staple, thanks to Turner Classic Movies, which regularly airs director Don Hartman's film multiple times every winter.

In the movie, Mitchum stars as Steve Mason, a veritable Kerouac-like beatnik ahead of his time. Selling toys in an upscale New York City department store to make enough money to pursue his passion for making and restoring boats on the coast, Steve loses his job after he fails to report Janet Leigh's comparison shopper Connie Ennis, a war widow and single mother of the sweetly mischievous young Timmy (Gordon Gebert). Falling for Connie, after Steve makes the grand gesture of buying her son the expensive toy train set he'd had his eye on, he complicates Connie's already slightly strained relationship with her loyal and kind no-sparks beau, Carl (played by Wendell Corey).

With screwball-worthy elements including a hilarious sequence that plays out in court and one of the steamiest holiday screen kisses in this or any year (in a moment that word is Janet Leigh didn't even know was coming), "Holiday Affair" is a winning, admittedly odd, yet adorable romantic comedy. Featuring a Lux Radio Theater production of the tale, which was based upon John D. Weaver's story "Christmas Gift" and adapted by screenwriter Isobel Lennart (who would write for Mitchum once again in both "The Sundowners" and "Two for the Seesaw"), this crisp transfer of the wintry black-and-white film has been newly released on Warner Archive Blu-ray.

"The Shop Around the Corner" (1940)

Though by now the plot device has been used so many times in romantic storytelling that it's spawned an entire subgenre of the trope titled "enemies to lovers" fiction, one of the most endearing early examples of this in screen romantic comedy can be found in director Ernst Lubitsch's bittersweet 1940 holiday classic "The Shop Around the Corner."

Based on the 1937 play "Parfumerie," by Hungarian writer Miklós László, which was adapted by longtime Lubitsch screenwriter Samson Raphaelson (in addition to an uncredited assist by Ben Hecht), the movie led to a number of high profile stage and screen remakes, including Broadway's "She Loves Me," as well as the films "In the Good Old Summertime," and "You've Got Mail" (which was also inspired by the classic enemies to lovers Jane Austen novel, "Pride and Prejudice").

Notable for its decision to leave politics out of the equation but pay tribute to its origins by setting the action in Hungary at a time when America was on the long on-ramp towards the second world war, "The Shop Around the Corner" takes place just before Christmastime in the small Budapest based Matuschek and Company leather goods shop.

Getting to know a trio of its handful of workers intimately, the film primarily revolves around the store's kind boss in the midst of a personal crisis, Mr. Matuschek (Frank Morgan), as well as his loyal right-hand man Alfred Kralik (James Stewart), and the store's newest employee Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan). Pitted against one another in real life with their dueling sales practices and taste, the viewer soon discovers that Alfred and Klara are at the same time also falling in love on paper as anonymous correspondents, writing each other romantic love letters which are delivered to numbered post office boxes.

With its trademark sophisticated Lubitsch wit, which boldly alternates from subtly sexy lines such as "I took you out of your envelope and read you, read you right there” and a startlingly sad subplot concerning Matuschek which takes the film into much darker territory, "The Shop Around the Corner" is that rarest of all holiday movies. Still incredibly modern in the way that it acknowledges both the romantic highs and lonely lows of the season, it's a refreshingly mature, grown-up work that makes today's overly beige, cookie-cutter, assembly line ready made-for-cable movies feel outdated and far too quaintly naive by comparison.

Though "The Shop Around the Corner" is a lovely romance all around, it's still undoubtedly Morgan's Matuschek that most tugs at the heartstrings both from an acting standpoint and when you watch the film in the devastation of 2020. Still, "Shop" generates most of its fire from the winning chemistry of Stewart and Sullavan as we find ourselves siding first with one lead followed by the other from one scene to the next. Enviably written and performed, despite how much I enjoyed both of its famous American remakes, this even-handed approach didn't translate nearly as well in "In the Good Old Summertime" or "You've Got Mail" since we're predominantly only drawn in by the female protagonists' plights throughout.

Beautifully shot by Lubitsch's frequent DP William H. Daniels, who's also well-known for being Greta Garbo's personal cinematographer, the film's lushly snowy black-and-white photography is given a glossy new shine in Warner Archive's new Blu-ray release of the film, which includes two radio broadcasts of "Shop" along with the bonus feature "A New Romance of Celluloid: The Miracle of Sound."