I don’t know how I can manage to read widely enough in the indie movie scene to know ones I want to see, and still manage to go into them unaware of their tonal shifts and reveals. It’s a treat for me, I love surprises, but it does make me feel a little like I’m robbing you all of something when I then turn around and talk vague circles around it.

I can’t help it though, because when done right these turns are rocking and stabilizing at once, what *makes* the picture. Is this turn done right? Maybe. It sure as hell packs a lot more thoughts in. I think if the runtime had run out on what I thought for sure was the final image, this would have been a lighter but stronger movie, with the TABLEAU-and-cut-the-lights feel of a bold stage play finish. Concluding that way would still throw some commentary back on what came before, but everyone would just call this version an artsy hedonistic romp with a dark ending. Instead, A Bigger Splash keeps spooling out for quite a bit longer, and while it probably ends up less sound as a film, it does wrap up having delivered a whole lot more interesting ideas about privilege and relationships. So what IS good art? Art that makes you think? Art that’s well made? Art that entertains? What if someone said you could only pick two at a time?

Some movies do all three at once of course. A Bigger Splash I’m not sure always does, but just blows right out of the turquoise water all the movies out there only doing one. And as for the entertainment value, you are all hopefully aware that this movie features Tilda Swinton as a vacationing rockstar with a closet of custom Dior, and a pinned scene that’s just several minutes of Ralph Fiennes enthusiastically dancing around a sun-struck villa to ‘Emotional Rescue’.

Anyway let’s talk about Luca Guadagnino. I love Luca Guadagnino, because he makes cinematic mood poems that happen to also have plots. I’ve just completed his self-described “Desire trilogy” with this one, and while they carry over no characters and are thematically linked only by pools and perhaps the most common subject in film, they are still a trilogy, because Luca made them. I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name have different feels and different looks, but they all have Feel and Look, piles of it, swaths, songs. You can feel the clothes, which are, to the last character, perfect. You can feel the architectural spaces of it. You almost feel you could catch a tan from the tangibility of the bright Italian sunlight pouring over skin.

So A Bigger Splash is that Luca thing, but like, the more manic, rich-trashy version of it. The sun might be a little too hot white. The perfect costumes are frequently coming off. It still has that languid, hang-out pace (and length), but what’s contained in those summer beats is spikier. It’s casually erotic, it’s vacation, it’s dramaz, it’s funny until-it’s-not, and then it is again but different, more horror to it. I think ultimately I’m writing it down as “mixed” but I want a lot more like it.

Riskily, I’d already been speaking highly of this film to people purely on the strength of its trailer, and how several critics I like seemed to like it a whole bunch.

And maybe I shouldn’t have finally sat down for the art house Calvinist climate change drama after two large glasses of white wine, as you’d probably think this is the kind of movie where now I’d do a play on “sobering”. But First Reformed is a strange bold harrowing high, so careful and strickening and wild and unanswerable that instead of sobering up I came out of that feeling like I was haunted, like I was fucking possessed, stumbling along the streets breathing around these slow seizes of my ribcage. I think I’ve discovered a new genre I love: something restrained yet outrageous. The Phantom Threads of the world. Movies that respond “yes” when you ask “just slowly fuck me up!”

This movie is so well-placed in itself and in the current moment…I’m struck, I’m still reveling. The lovely lonely damaged fierceness of Ethan Hawke, who has aged into exactly the kind of handsome that still might become a reverend. The unguarded realism of Amanda Seyfried’s performance, within precisely my favorite amount of experiential surrealism. The spare, tonal way Paul Schrader uses framing and music. How it’s all too transcendental to say it goes off the rails, more that it goes for broke, for breaking, creating something like the Austere Uncanny. You know that thing where you can feel your heart beating in your stomach? The final act of First Reformed.

I have just one complaint and it’s that the blood was so good and I wanted more, I wanted blood just welling through and no I’m not explaining further and yes that’s intended to be the most acute kind of shrouded spoiler.

Are you washed – ARE YOU WASHED / In the blood – IN THE BLOOD / IN THE SOUL-CLEANSING BLOOD OF THE LAAAMMB

Okay I’m out!!

Ocean’s 8 gave me everything I knew I wanted (heists, ladies, the Met Gala, coats) and even things I didn’t (references to the Williamstown Theatre Festival, co-op board jokes). I enjoyed myself so much. This is such a pleasant, chill movie. There really isn’t any tension or dramatics, just a group of women gently bantering and doing crime. There have been some critiques that Ocean’s 8 doesn’t have enough zip, and sure, if you need zip in everything, but honestly this was relaxing af and I needed that. It’s a high femme hang-out caper, and if that’s derivative then please direct me to where I can find the rest of those, because this was like a bubblebath after a long day.

How’s the cast? You already know the answer to that: extraordinary. Superhero franchises weep at the sheer wattage of this lineup. How’s the gay? The whole movie ranges from subtly sapphic to Cate Blanchett as “Lou”. Helena Bonham Carter’s accent? A soft-edged Irish that’s so good on her. What gets stolen? The show, by Anne Hathaway. Anne Hathaway is doing a high-wire act of vacuous actress femininity, The Joke, The Mark, and The Meta all wrapped into one Janelle Monáe Pynk bow, smilingly turning the dial to 11 while maintaining direct eye contact. I love her. Annie Forever.

My favorite line in this movie was in the trailers, but it didn’t diminish it one jot. It’s when Lou asks Debbie Ocean why she needs to do this, and she leans a bit to take a bite off her plate and calmly says: “Because it’s what I’m good at.” This is a movie where Anna Wintour plays herself. This is a movie where Anna Wintour’s special events director also plays herself. Not to imply running Vogue is like running a con, except in how it is—except in how these woman are good at this. Like all heist movies, you come for the competence porn. This time it just takes the form of Sandra Bullock in a beautiful dress going on a tear in her fluent German for several minutes. God I love when they let Sandra Bullock speak German…

In closing, the supporting men deliver as well: commendations to the always clever Richard Armitage for understanding that one of the key features of being a rich bearded art dealer douchebag is that they are in fact quite boring, and three cheers for the return of James Cordon as just a delightful actor, turning in a great subtly odd comedic performance. “Oh, to be you!”

In March, Sebastián Lelio won an Oscar for his movie about a Chilean transwoman coping with an inquiry after the death of her boyfriend. And now a few months later, he’s rolled out his English language debut: an Orthodox Jewish lesbian drama set in a cold outskirt of London. Sebastián Lelio is a man to watch, it seems, for his dedication to putting fascinating female identities on screen.

Though Disobedience is probably Rachel Weisz’s movie as much as his. She was the one who first approached the author of the original novel about adapting it, and continued to serve as a producer on the project as well as one of the leads. She shares the billing with Rachel McAdams, in something of a pleasant surprise: initially it seems that Weisz’s character is the central role, but the film gently expands to become as much about Esti as Ronit. It’s probably no surprise at all that the two of them, both lovely empathetic actors, balance focus between them with grace and give. And it’s remarkable that for all that their stories are shaped by each other, both women have their own personal narratives they’re working through as well. They both get quiet, unhurried scenes by themselves, just processing, existing, contextualizing who they are in this world, who they could have been or still could be.

The very first thing you hear in this movie, while the opening credits are still slipping off, is a horn, a shofar. In the darkness it sounds sooo ancient. It also sounds like something flung out of space. You know I was originally going to make a 2001 reference here but it seems I’m making a Carol reference instead! It does actually remind me of Carol, in feel. They’re both stories about women loving women where so much is done in glance and bend. The kinds of films people call subtle, which is how you say ‘slow’ when you like that it is. Disobedience has its own pace, set in a community with rhythms that stretch back millennia. Watching Ronnie adjust her tempo to it when she comes back is wonderful; watching Esti come into harmony against her is why you buy your ticket.

And because we’re all making this joke, yes there is a sex scene that will, literally, snatch your wig. My audience was into it. My audience was two elderly men and about a dozen women, in singles or in pairs, and I knew we were a community when after about half an hour of respectful, quiet movie-watching, we all just lost it at a hilariously awkward Shabbat dinner. To my matinee gals: we’ll always have ‘Lovesong’.

Well cats and kittens, he’s done it again!! Or more accurately he’s just always been doing it, apparently. Boy is Taika Waititi’s 2010 feature, only his second. It tells the story of an 11-year-old Māori kid, the titular Boy, whose deadbeat ex-con father comes swanning back into his life after skipping off for nearly all of it. But to hear Boy tell it—and we do, with full-color visuals—his dad is the coolest thing since sliced bread and Michael Jackson put together, larger than life, and the only reason he hasn’t been in his son’s, is because he’s been too be busy having wild & wonderful adventures. To hear Alamein himself tell it, yeah that’s true. A chip off the ol’ block this kid.

So it’s a movie about identity, as you might imagine. And it’s Taika, so it’s honest and hilarious and full of kooky heart, a tender and clever and carefully made little film. It also, diverging from his others, deals more than a bit in magical realism, and I super want to talk about that, first by talking about a conversation I had last week with a coworker of mine.

He was helping me sort books to yard-sale off to our other coworkers from our office’s bewilderingly expansive library (long story), and naturally I, a nerd with a blog, and he, a former English teacher and Border’s employee, started spontaneously pulling Staff Picks. Which is how we started talking about Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, and how he started telling me about an interesting conversation he got into with a stranger on Twitter once. This person was arguing that magical realism was created by Latin American authors, and as such it belongs to them and is disingenuous when used by people from other cultures. “Huh,” I said. Definitely there is a strong tradition of magical realism in Latin America, and that makes sense to me because I’d always thought of it more generally as a style deployed in response to trauma, wherever it might have occurred. My coworker: “That’s what I said!!” And then he started talking about magical realism in Russian lit (some trauma there for sure), and I confessed that one of my long-standing favorite “genres” is what I call The Only Way We Can Talk About The War Is With Magical Realism, and then we looked at each other in perplexment over how we don’t hang out outside of work to talk stories, because we clearly should.

And when we do, I’m going to see if his love for Taika Waititi extends to Boy, so we can talk about how effectively this movie uses its magical realism, born directly out of the imaginative coping mechanisms Boy and his brother Rocky have each developed in response to the traumas they’ve gone through. In difficult times Boy often flees to the magic of Michael Jackson dancing, and the beauty and cool he felt when he first saw him perform. Meanwhile, his sweet younger brother creates superheroes, drawing them out in colors in his notebook, and imagines that he too might have powers. Both of these create some of the most moving and lovely visuals in the movie, gradually deepening in dreaminess as the movie progresses, until at times the story begins to flirt with the edge of myth.

It makes perfect sense too, that Taika Waititi would be drawn to such a visually rich form of storytelling. Like Wes Anderson, who he’s been compared to before (the intro to this feels like a Māori Rushmore, in a wonderful and subversive way), he stuffs the frame with images and information, and hangs it all securely on good music. You can see in everything he does how wholly in love he is with the look & rhythm of movies. They are suffused with joy of their existence, his films, even when they deal in subject matter of the very Real Shit variety. Maybe that’s his trick to keep his audience’s heart warm and soaring, even when it feels like it’s breaking.

That, and to always end on hope—and a glorious dance number if you can swing it.

Previously on Taika: What We Do In the Shadows, Hunt For the Wilderpeople, Thor: Ragnarok

The Fugitive is part of that family of films I think of as living room popcorn movies. The movies that came out when I was still too young to be going to the theater much, so I’ve never seen them on the big screen, but there’s just something innately popcorny about them. Where even if you’re watching it on TV with your family in your sweatpants on a holiday weekend, even if you’re just watching it alone in your apartment, you’re urging characters on under your breath and exclaiming at all the big fun moments. And whether you’ve seen them once or a thousand times, they always feel recognizable. There’s something safe about these movies, and it’s like that sense of security lets you get completely caught up in them, a cinematic escape even when you’re just in your own living room. Sorry not now, The Fugitive‘s on, and we’re gonna watch the heck out of this.

In this case, I’m in the ‘once’ camp, because this was somehow the first time I’d ever seen this movie. I thought I remembered a scene from it that I wandered past my dad watching at some point, but that scene never occurred, so who knows what I was thinking of. The Fugitive is a classic, it’s beloved, and one of those that renews your faith in the collective taste, because this one really is damn good. Yeah it’s a little long, and like most 2+ hour movies I think it’d actually be stronger if they’d been forced to cut at least 20 minutes, but in a creative way where they don’t lose those sequences of closed-lip, harried tension. They are also not allowed to touch a word of Tommy Lee Jones’ dialogue.

I mean I don’t think this movie is like The Sting, where everyone has to pick either Robert Redford or Paul Newman and if you’re lucky you and your best friend each take a different one and you high five about it, but if it is: Tommy Lee Jones. Tommy Lee Jones is a delight in this, he’s wonderful, he can get it, it being my hand in action movie marriage. His performance is completely unusual in a way that never feels anything but present and real. With the way he reads his lines he’s almost doing a really great stage performance, which may be why Tom Stoppard wishes he’d written some of them. Anyway I’m very into it.

I am also so into, I find, the dogged, lawful investigator characters. Your Odo’s, your Major Calloway’s. Centered in their competence. Relentlessly reliable. It’s so great watching them claim they don’t care, when really they just [clenches fist] care so much.

A documentary where diminutive octogenarian French New Wave visionary Agnès Varda palls around rural France with lanky young contemporary street artist JR already held a lot of appeal for me, and then JR brought several bemused cardboard cutouts of Agnès to the Oscar nominees luncheon and that was some of the most enjoyable shit I’ve ever seen. I finally watched their movie this past Sunday afternoon while snacking on a slice of cake, and do you know? It was adorable.

Faces Places is such a good luck charm of a film, right up to the wonderful Franco-Anglo serendipity of there being a rhyme-preserving translation for the original Visages, Villages. Similarly fateful, Agnès and JR met seemingly by whim and then just decided to embark on an art project together. “I made the first move,” JR confides. You darlings.

They are a perfect pair of complements. Agnès shuffles around with her blurring vision and bright bi-colored hair and collects people, finding faces and stories and gently composing them. And JR leaps and gambols and laughs behind his sunglasses, scaling the sides of buildings into huge canvases to paste the faces and stories she has found. They are both natural cajolers, drawing others into their plots with ease, probably because what they make is consistently lovely. Outsized and sweet, and just odd enough to be terrifically crowd-pleasing. 

In short, there are few more pleasant ways you could spend an hour and a half than riding around the French countryside in a van shaped like a giant camera with JR and Agnès Varda, where the only running thread to contend with is Agnès’ continuing attempts to get JR to take off his sunglasses.

Thoroughbreds takes the strange, nervy stylishness and distant teenage girl psychopathy of Stoker, and multiplies it by Heavenly Creatures, which is to say times two. A fatal fille folie à deux. I’m here for it.

Many critics have been comparing it to Heathers, and there are a lot of overlaps there, for instance lawn sport set pieces. But after the cool, inky gloss of Stoker, I think Heavenly Creatures is the better companion piece for Thoroughbreds, for that element that surprisingly I’ve seen no critic mention, only the writer-director: that he made a psychological thriller sure, but also a romantic comedy. This movie is by far best understood as a weird, muted, obsessive romance between two 17-year-old sociopaths who don’t know how to love each other. By Hannibal standards, this shit gets outright tender. I had some real feelings here! A good joke on me, out of something this darkly deadpan.

So that was fun. Thoroughbreds is just fun. It began its life as a play, and that’s fun (you can easily see how Cory Finley original had it: just two odd girls on a big couch). The score is exceedingly wonky fun. There are so many rack focus shots, the most fun shot. The tone is glib and dry and nimble—fun. The girls at its heart don’t care, which frees the film up to not get too precious about itself. At one point, Anton Yelchin swooningly sniffs a bar of fancy soap in slow motion as ‘Ave Maria’ plays, and then the movie just laughs it off and slide-locks into a sharply macabre Noël Coward scene, literally set in a drawing room.

There’s potentially something in this script about empathy and success, a class-conscious commentary on the moral apathy bought by the rich, but this too is more dry and glib than anything. It’s not like it’s totally empty as a gesture, it’s just a little, “Florals, for spring?” Frankly I think if you want to talk about something fresh in this new voice, it’s how this young straight guy wrote a movie in which two teen girls have no boyfriends, no fraught exes, no crushes, no guys they’re interested in at all. Their stories are wholly unencumbered by any of that, that whole quadrant deemed irrelevant and never even alluded to, like they live in some rarified heterosexuality-free pocket of Connecticut. Like I said this movie is fun.

***

Nota bene: Earlier I called them sociopaths—Amanda actually reads like a pretty straightforward caricature of a psychopath, though that’s seemingly the only mental makeup she doesn’t mention; Lily is something more complicated. But they’re both pure sociopaths in the film tradition, which has decided that’s the term for any characters who exhibit that recognizable movie strain of ~morally aberrant behavior~. And so just like how English majors are the only people who can garner any utility in still talking about Freud, psychology has yielded ‘sociopath’ to the film critics, where all these out-dated, simplistic models work great on the fictional people we make up.

My notes on The Beguiled take a hilarious unhinged uptick two-thirds of the way in, which I think tells you what this movie does. It goes off. It begins like Sofia Coppola Does Picnic At Hanging Rock, which is already what we need in this world, and then act three begins and everything goes completely buckwild. Admittedly, Picnic At Hanging Rock also gets weird af, but while there it’s more of the surreal sun-drugged afternoon daymare school of unsettling, The Beguiled is being startled awake in the middle of the night by a frantically poised Nicole Kidman with bloody surgeon’s hands directing Kirsten Dunst in ringing tones: “Bring me the anatomy book!”

My notes: “Nicole I am screaming!!!!!!”

The Beguiled really does start off so much more gauzy, which is what makes the transition such a treat. The cinematography is on serious point, all the women in these pale antebellum dresses glowing like powdery moths against a dark, smudgy, decaying Virginia. It’s the waning years of the Civil War, and the society the handful of girls at Miss Martha’s finishing school are still listlessly practicing to join is as doomed to demise as this old mansion is to succumb to the encroaching vegetation, that only ever seems to get closer to the porch each time they cut it back.

It’s all mist and thick slanting sunlight through these huge, huge tress dripping with moss, a white dress spilling over the legs of a girl artfully yet carelessly resting on one of the lower branches — and into this slowly stifling household stumbles an injured Union soldier, an enemy, a man, his arrival like dropping a stone into a pool. Or like dropping Colin Farrell into a pool, it’s more exactly like that. Immediately every woman in the house wants to sleep with him, which is a sort of plot I usually find tedious, but this time it’s Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled and she makes it worth your while. And weird.

This movie is, speaking generally, kind of like Phantom Thread. A gradual then exponentially increasing veer to the most high-key end, a wealth of powerhouse female performances, ravishingly beautiful, and terribly funny in its obscure morbid mode. The Beguiled is also like Phantom Thread in one very specific way, and if you’ve seen them both you do not need me to go on because you shrieked at it immediately.

The Third Man is one of my very favorite movies of all time, and the first one I would show people who think all those old black-and-white films are too slow. Within just a handful of minutes, we’ve gotten a crash course in the post-war politics of 1940s Vienna, met our main character on his way there, found out his friend he was going to meet was hit by a car just a few hours ago, and are, suitcase still in hand, looking down at his grave while this rollicking zither score plays. Who says old movies can’t MOVE.

You really do know right from the start that this one is different. The voiceover for the opening history lesson is impeccably blithe, feeling exceedingly British in that, but at the same time speaks to this very European sort of jaded ennui. “Wonderful,” the narrator chuckles over the hapless four-part assemblage of the Allied police force, “what hope they had. All strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language.” This movie already has you laughing and we’re still in preamble. ‘Surprise!‘ it says. And it is a bit; according to the charters of this sort of thing, The Third Man is one of the very best of film noir, where “the streets were dark with something more than night.” But it sometimes happens, and oh I love it, that the preeminent versions of genre films are also deeply funny, simultaneously commenting on the genre as they perfect it.

Alright, so where are we — ah yes post-war Vienna, as mentioned. One of the best sets for a film that ever was. All partially bombed out buildings and Dutch angles and the street lights apparently at knee height and tilted up toward the nearest poetic escarpment of rubble and dilapidated grandeur. There is an extended sequence in a echoing, beautiful, stone-built sewer system, and for the first time since Victor Hugo you wish you could stay down there twice as long.

Into this chiaroscuro playground are tumbled an affable rube of an American pulp novelist turned situational detective; a kind, trimly professional British major with that wonderful clipped yet drawled English accent that died with Trevor Howard; a sad, morbid, beautifully disaffected comedy actress barely making a living hawking the tea and whiskey the foreign officers toss her in lieu of flowers; a German baron who looks like the Grinch and carries a tiny puppy tucked in his coat sleeves; and a slew of other progressively shadier characters from the thriving racketeering trade that has overrun the divided city.

And, of course, Orson Welles. Orson Welles, the original Philip Seymour Hoffman. With the best intro in cinema history and a zippy, cynical monologue on violence & culture as apocryphally improvised and deservedly acclaimed as Rutger Hauer’s C-beam speech in Blade Runner.

The second time I watched The Third Man, it was part of a Welles double feature at Film Forum in New York City with three friends of mine. I was the only one who had seen it before, and was so gratified when they fell in love with it as much as I had, laughingly singing the zither melodies at one another all the way back uptown. This is one of those classics that really, really earns it. Come for the gorgeous cinematography, come for the dry modern hilarity, come for the twisty film noir plotting — just come.